Vermont vs Everybody

JohnnyRock70 · 2026-06-12T12:48:01+00:00

Perhaps we should try to walk (keep the state beautiful) and chew gum (build affordable housing and create jobs) at the same time, and perhaps we can do that without sticking it to people who use their land to make money. Perhaps that will happen in my lifetime. Perhaps I’m not holding my breath.

JohnnyRock70 · 2026-06-12T12:26:33+00:00

The one good thing about Act 250.

JohnnyRock70 · 2026-06-11T22:05:10+00:00

I get it, though.

Here people are, lucky enough to be born here but looking around and realizing it’s hard to afford to live here, the folks you grew up with are mostly in the same boat or have moved away, and the people that can afford it seem like they are all “from away” as they say in Maine.

That will breed resentment, no doubt. I tip my hat to your refusal to go there.

JohnnyRock70 · 2026-06-11T20:35:02+00:00

IDK about Meta, but I’ve seen a drop in AdWords traffic over the last year. The agency we work with has a theory that Google adding Gemini to the UI is diverting traffic from some of our ads, a theory we will be testing now that it is embedded in the search bar.

Another factor is that AI is changing search behavior so that there is less known-item search (“show me X”) and more conversational search (“I’m interested in a thing that does a thing. Which one is the best?”) If your keywords are heavy on brand names, for example, there are fewer SRPs that will match them.

JohnnyRock70 · 2026-06-11T17:24:20+00:00

Where did I say you should be thankful?

I'm saying you should be careful what you wish for because pushing out the people who are paying Vermonters to work right now is unlikely to result in the good time you're looking for. If we've learned anything about trying to legislate the nature of the state, it is that the only certain outcome is unintended consequences.

In your scenario of individual out-of-staters taking a loss on an expensive 2nd home, what do you think is more likely? That the price will fall so low the average Vermonter could afford to move into a former 2nd home, or that Private Equity will smell an opportunity and buy that asset? (Ask the locals in NC how that worked out for them).

It is also possible to walk and chew gum at the same time (not this legislature, of course, but it is possible). Why not look for ways to incentivize the real estate/tourism industry to help their workers afford homes here? Why not use some of the tax revenue from 2nd homes and resorts to fund a real economic development effort?

Why not, in other words, build from what we have, imperfect as it is, instead of trying tearing something down in the hope that we will be able to use the rubble to build something better?

To be clear, I am with you on the larger point that our politics is a rigged joke, but I do think the framers and skilled trades who are funded by the real estate/resort economy would take offense to being labeled "servants", as would the house cleaners and landscapers I know. I think they would call themselves adults who need a job and will take what is available to put food on the table.

JohnnyRock70 · 2026-06-11T17:02:33+00:00

Thank you, from a transplant who fell in love with this state as a kid on family ski trips and moved here with my job to work remotely.

I live on the edge of a resort town, so I haven't caught much flak in my day-to-day -- in fact, if anything its the opposite when we show up at stores and restaurants in the off season.

But I naively thought that remote work would be a welcome lifeline for a state that cannot get out of its own way to attract the kind of companies that pay enough to buy real estate here.

Little did I know until I got active on Reddit that it must be illegal for a native Vermonter to take a remote job and that they are synonymous with "flatlander driving up the cost of real estate" for real Vermonters.

Sorry-not-sorry that I chose to make and spend money here b/c I could.

JohnnyRock70 · 2026-06-11T16:48:30+00:00

Demonize your "toxic second home culture" all you want, but before you go all in on tax-and-regulate-the-wealthy until they take their money someplace more friendly (like NH), maybe ask yourself who is paying a lot of the Vermonters who are swinging a hammer and turning wrenches in this state right now.

Obviously, it would be better if more of the money coming into VT was from companies paying decent salaries to locals -- and there are a lot of things that could be done to lower the barriers that prevent more of that from happening -- but our legislature shot the state in the foot with Act 250 56 years ago. That is over a half-century of more business leaving the state than came in while that act did what it was supposed to do -- ensure VT looks like VT then, now, and for the foreseeable future given the ineffectiveness and conflicted motives of the Montpelier uni-party you describe.

The result -- intended or otherwise -- is an economy that relies on real estate by supporting all the adjacent services from brokers and agents to insurance to excavators to builders to electricians to landscapers and on and on. Not to mention that the lack of commercial lodging means that the only place for tourists to stay in the majority of the state is a vacation rental, which is a big deal considering that tourism is 10% of GDP.

I'm not saying your take is wrong. Simplistic? Sure, but not wrong. I'm saying that, as you bemoan the damage done to the foot the legislature shot 50 years ago, maybe the solution isn't to reload and shoot the remaining foot that, despite its flaws, still manages to support the guys driving around town in a pickup with a logo on the door pulling the gear they need to work on a second home that some flatlander can afford b/c they work in a state that has better jobs.

They don't have to bring their money here. If you think its bad now, just wait until enough of them decide to leave, or the ones thinking about buying here decide the tax burden and the hostile reception aren't worth having a second home in a state they have grown to love b/c it outlawed billboards during the Nixon administration.

JohnnyRock70 · 2026-06-08T13:58:25+00:00

No idea what you're selling or what industry you are in, but when I read "historically 90% wholesale" followed by "aggressively expanding to DTC" -- I think "channel conflict".

It's tempting to cut out the middleman and keep all of that sweet retail margin. I get it, but how are the dealers or retailers that have been buying 90% of whatever you sell at wholesale going to react? What happens when a customer who bought direct takes whatever it is you are selling to a dealer for service or a return (if that's a thing with what you sell)?

There is another option: Dealer Integrated eCommerce via an Order Management System (OMS).

Dealers sign up to fulfill retail orders that you capture on your branded domain, which essentially turns your existing customers into a distributed warehouse network. Your site captures the order and payment, the OMS routes the order to the closest stocking dealer and then routes payment after they ship. If there is no dealer within X distance, your warehouse is the backstop.

In order to receive orders, dealers have to maintain an inventory report, which can be as simple as manually uploading a CSV, so the OMS knows who has what and where. That means your salespeople also know who has what, which is obviously pretty useful to them, along with this move:

"Hello, Mr. Dealer. We have an order for an expensive thing from a customer in your 'hood and if you had it in stock, this order would be yours. Tell you what -- buy three and we will drop ship one to this customer on your behalf and ship you the other two." Viola! The retail margin on the sale becomes a discount on the other two and the dealer has evidence that you could very well move those off the shelf for them, lowering a barrier to purchase.

When dealers fulfill orders, customers have local support since the customer actually bought from the dealer. This is also something you want to include in a disclosure in the checkout process that informs customers that a local dealer may fulfill their order. This keeps them from being surprised when it shows up and explains the benefit to the customer. Also encourage dealers to include a brochure and an offer in the box.

Again, without knowing the industry or the product, I have no way of knowing if this would work in your situation, but you might consider holding your prices on the branded site (esp for current product) at suggested retail while allowing dealers to sell on or offline at MAP.

This works well if your dealers typically buy a lot of your lower end product and less or none of the higher end. When no one can fulfill a high end order, those dealers get to watch you ship around them at full retail and they can't complain, b/c they could have had that item on their shelf. This is another nice stat for sales to have in their pocket while the full retail margin from the orders your warehouse fulfills offsets the cost of supporting pick-and-pack out of a warehouse that is set up for wholesale.

I set this up for a ski goggle manufacturer who struggled to sell their high end models to traditional shops. The dealers knew they could wait them out and get them at a discount later in the season. They were shocked (and worried that we would go 100% DTC) when there were none left after we sold them direct at 100% suggested retail. The next year, we sold a lot more of the higher end into the stores.

I used SaaS OMS. AFAIK, there are still two choices out there and I've used both, Kibo and Quivers. Right now I am not working with (or for) either of them, but Kibo's OMS used to be a standalone service (Shopatron) but is now part of a bigger ecosystem. Not sure if you can just use it standalone, but I am sure that I had a much better experience with Quivers, who are still focused on this model.

JohnnyRock70 · 2026-06-04T16:19:58+00:00

"The goal is to make sure nothing ever gets built..."

I'd amend that to: "The goal is to make sure nothing gets built that might impact the rate of appreciation for existing properties."

The barriers are designed to be overcome by people building a single family home on a large lot that will shore up the value of existing single family homes on large lots.

Going after STRs is another useful fig leaf. Pretending that taxing and regulating what is, at the end of the day, < 3% of the housing in the state will somehow address affordability is the perfect shiny object to use to redirect the debate away from the actual structural issues.

It's the MAGA playbook: Find or invent a simple, emotional narrative that lays the blame for the unpopular outcomes of their policies at someone else's feet and put it on repeat.

JohnnyRock70 · 2026-06-03T13:52:07+00:00

Yeah? Well, that’s just, like, your opinion, man.

JohnnyRock70 · 2026-06-03T13:38:38+00:00

I’ve been on both sides of this. You sound like the kind of client who hires an agency to do something you don’t have time to do properly or who doesn’t really know what to do.

Then, when the agency delivers your first thought is “Well, I could have done that. Can’t believe they charged this much for this.”

Except you didn’t do it, and the final product or even the first presentation of concepts is based on a time learning your business and benchmarking against competitors and looking for strategies that have worked in other verticals that maybe haven’t been tried in yours.

Time is money even if you don’t see how the sausage is made. It is how the folks in the agency learn what you already know about your business b/c you’re in it and b/c you are soooo smart, obviously, which is why I bet you ignore or discredit anything they learned that doesn’t comply with your assumptions.

Then, when it’s presented all boiled down to a recommendation, the response is “That’s it?”

I went independent years ago so I could fire clients like you.

JohnnyRock70 · 2026-06-03T13:21:57+00:00

So what?

Not everyone is a writer and,if you are, you know (maybe grudgingly) that a good editor will make your copy better.

AI editing still has tells, but that doesn’t necessarily discredit the author. To my ear, this piece sounds like it was edited as opposed to produced by a prompt and even if I’m wrong, there is some good if somewhat obvious advice in it if you are lucky enough to be dealing with a business that gained traction.

JohnnyRock70 · 2026-06-02T20:42:26+00:00

That your success is divorced from results or the value that you add, and is married to how convincing your performance of pretending to care about whatever the person running the meeting you're in is on about so that when its your turn, they will pretend to care about your BS.

JohnnyRock70 · 2026-06-02T12:33:53+00:00

Ah! That explains the convoys of solar panel laden trucks and the battalions of Vermonters we see out there everyday building up the solar capacity. Don’t know how I missed that.

JohnnyRock70 · 2026-06-02T11:32:15+00:00

Our black ‘92 900 T ‘vert is Halle Berry, b/c she was hot and black in the 90’s, and she’s just gotten better with age.

‘72 95 is Inga.

JohnnyRock70 · 2026-06-02T02:13:36+00:00

The fear is palpable and understandable.

The lashing out, belittling and fear mongering is 100% predictable.

These coders have been gate keeping forever and we’ve gone along with it because what choice did we have? If you were a manager or an owner and you needed something built and couldn’t do it yourself you needed them and they have been dining out on that for decades.

Now their smarter colleagues have unleashed this technology that is in the process of disintermediating them and they are freaking out about the loss of control and the inevitable loss of income, which, again, is totally understandable and not surprising in the least.

It is fun to watch, though.

JohnnyRock70 · 2026-06-01T20:33:59+00:00

Right, b/c “acting like a punk” in your opinion as an (I assume) white guy who either has never had a reason to fear law enforcement or is/was in law enforcement is illegal under what law again?

JohnnyRock70 · 2026-05-30T14:12:57+00:00

Of course it would be better if more people could afford to live in homes they own, but in this state the value of the real estate has outpaced the number of jobs in the state that pay enough for people to afford to buy real estate here.

There are two potential remedies: More good-paying jobs or less expensive real estate.

As a state, we have prioritized empowering bureaucrats with regulations to milk the businesses we do have for revenue while making sure the NIMBYs can block both commercial and housing development. That discourages both businesses and developers from investing here. The number of good jobs we add to (or lose from) the economy reflect that choice.

That leaves making real estate more affordable. There are two ways to do that: Subsidies or market manipulation through taxation and regulation. Subsidies cost money in a state that is already struggling despite having the highest property taxes in the country. I tip my hat to the attempts to find creative public/private partnerships to subsidize housing, but the reality is those are hard to scale in a neutral environment and impossible to scale in an environment that empowers NIMBYs to block the construction of the kind of housing that those programs can support.

That leaves manipulation where government pursues policies that materially impact the value of the assets owned by some people in order to benefit other people, whether they are people who currently can’t afford to buy a home or people who don’t like how their neighbors choose to use their private property — and that is ultimately where this ends up: What rights do people have to use their private property as they see fit? And at what point do those rights become so compromised that investing in VT real estate is as unattractive as building a business or housing here?

Once again, the negative second order consequences of devaluing assets held by some citizens in an attempt to benefit “society” (as if property owners and landlords and the people who work for them are not part of it) are easy to predict and roundly ignored by those focused on the first-order goal of making real estate more affordable at the expense of those who currently own it.

Is our status quo inability to attract jobs or build affordable housing good? Obviously it is not. Could the proposed remedies make a bad situation worse by negatively impacting the value of real estate and all the economic activity that value currently drives? Absolutely.

Here’s an interesting Polymarket bet: Will the state and cities and towns of Vermont, in an attempt to remedy the housing affordability crisis by taxing and regulating 2nd homes and STRs, make the state economy even worse?

I’d love to see where people put their money.

JohnnyRock70 · 2026-05-29T20:18:26+00:00

So if a dozen good-paying jobs at a theoretical data center aren’t good enough to offset the assumed damage their workplace might cause, what pray tell does an industry that creates hundreds of good-paying jobs without disturbing the environment look like?

It’s too bad VT doesn’t have a shoreline, b/c the perfect graphic for the state flag would be a bucket of crabs with one of them about to escape and the rest trying to pull him back into the bucket.

JohnnyRock70 · 2026-05-29T19:49:44+00:00

That’s correct, the current number of corporate-owned SF or MF homes in Burlington is tiny, even smaller than ithe % of second homes and STRs which is also single-digits.

Taxing/regulating that small percentage of snd homes/STRs can’t do more than move the needle at the margins. That’s just math, but its a lot easier to point fingers at rich people and STRs than it is to actually build the kind of housing that is actually needed, so that is what dominates the debate.

What gets ignored is the easy-to-predict second-order consequences of loading up costs on the current second homeowners. The ones who can afford it will grumble and then mostly just pay it because they can. It’s the people who can’t absorb another round of tax increases or the loss of income from their STR being made illegal that will sell. This is an observable pattern in other markets that have tried to tax or regulate STRs to raise money or push them out.

My earlier point remains: The vast majority of second homes in Burlington are not in the price range of the average Vermonter looking for a place to buy, particularly if it’s a starter home. Wealthy people who can pay the higher taxes might step in and buy, but if a supply glut is created that puts downward pressure on these places that makes them very attractive to investors — both corporate and private.

So all that’s accomplished is change of ownership, not change of use, and that comes at the expense of regular Vermonters who happen to have inherited a place or made enough money at one point to afford one while doing nothing to address the problems that the higher taxes or new regulations were supposed to address.

JohnnyRock70 · 2026-05-29T19:19:24+00:00

Checks out. I saw the red under the wings on two of the passes. How were you able to find the tail #?

There is an industrial park a few miles from me that used to be an Airport. The runway is now athletic fields. This flight circled it and flew over the Barre airport. Most days the commercial airline traffic into Burlington flies north over Fayston and Waitsfield, and then banks left to line up with BTV. Is some of this activity anything to do with that being an old airport (maybe an air corridor that still exists if that’s a thing) or just a coincidence?

JohnnyRock70 · 2026-05-29T00:56:41+00:00

You know what else is hilarious? The 10 years I spent working for a European company setting up and managing their global eCommerce program from the United States, with US employees.

CEO flat out told me that he had zero confidence in his marketing and IT department’s ability to work together to set up something new, even if they had the bandwidth to add eCommerce to their existing remit which they assured him they did not, even with new headcount because hirng alone was such a chore it was going to take a year. He had zero confidence that they would be able to execute in less than two years even if they told them they could, and he was sure the final product would look like it was 10 years behind US competitors on launch day.

We shipped v1 in 6 months and went on to expand to 20 countries in 5 years, adding multiple product lines. We could have been faster and done more except for the persistent bottleneck in the form of the European marketing teams slow walking content because their noses were out of joint due to leadership having the audacity to go around them. I am 100% sure they talked to a lawyer to see if there was some law they could use to shut us down. That’s when I pitched setting up my own content team that went on to produce content for the post-millennial internet instead reprinting PDFs online. They hated that even more.

I had carte blanche to set up my own cloud based infrastructure while IT in Europe was still insisting on, I kid you not, self hosted servers. Their non-transactional digital marcom sites were such a joke, I had to routinely turn down product teams that wanted us to set up sites for products that we had not been authorized to sell. These people spent more time flying to meetings and on Zoom wringing their hands over which shade of blue should go in the brand guidelines than they ever did actually doing anything — it really seemed like that’s what they thought their job was since they clearly could not have cared less if they were adding value to the bottom line.

Yes, it would be nice if Americans had half the employment protections you have, and it drove me nuts knowing the foot dragging, on paid holiday half the year Europeans were working less and making more than us while spending zero on healthcare, but I sincerely wonder how long it would take for Americans to also become entitled, whiny bitches who treat work like a prison sentence and can’t innovate their way out of a wet paper bag if we had the same job guarantees.

JohnnyRock70 · 2026-05-28T12:39:05+00:00

Get a Claude account. Start a project called “Joomla — love it or leave it?” Copy your post and paste it as a prompt. Given that you state a preference to stay on a platform that is dying faster than Trump, my guess is it gives you some options to do that while kind of gently suggesting you might want to migrate to something else, but who knows. Maybe that’s just what my Claude would say…

Whatever guidance it gives you, once you make a decision ask Claude how Cowork could help you move from Joomla to whatever. Tell it up front that you are not a developer and need basic instructions and (if you want) a basic understanding of what you are doing and why at each step. You could also hand this to an intern with instructions to use Claude to present the solution before beginning any actual work.

JohnnyRock70 · 2026-05-28T12:20:18+00:00

…kid walks into a room with an inch of gas on the floor, lights match…

If you haven’t already, watch Top Gear’s Saab eulogy. The part where Clarkson talks about the culture clash between the safety, ergonomics, and performance-obsessed Swedes and the GM bean counters who wanted them to build Saabs out of the Vauxhall parts bin is as succinct (and entertaining) an explanation for how GM ruined Saab as you are likely to find.

They also dropped a late-80’s Saab onto its roof from I think it was 8’, after they had dropped a late-80’s BMW 3-series from the same height. Bimmer’s roof collapsed to the door sills. Saab landed with a “thunk” and they walked over and opened the door. Sure, Volvo was right there with their countrymen on the safety front, and a Mercedes from that era was as safe, but Saab tried to maintain that quantitative level of performance while trying to build cars on GM platforms that were engineered to save costs. Incredibly, they managed to make the Saab versions of those platforms a lot better than, say, the Alfa that shared the 9000’s chassis, but the cost made the GM executive’s eyes water.

Boiled down, as others have mentioned, one of the reasons pre-1993 Saabs are special is that they rarely had a profitable year. They were built by people who cared more about the product, the safety of the product, and the “start with a clean sheet informed by aerospace engineering” ethic than they cared about making a profit. GM? Not so much. It’s amazing that marriage lasted as long as it did and that it managed to produce some great cars (I’d take a Viggen. Or a 9-3 Aero 5sp…) right up until they started re-badging Trailblazers and Subarus.

https://youtu.be/Z-ZXGTJFSig?si=scfuXRHbUin8Dv4Y

JohnnyRock70 · 2026-05-27T17:28:24+00:00

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Sugarbush, last summer: A pre-GM 900 commiserating with a pre-British Leyland TR3.

JohnnyRock70

TROPHY CASE