Timing’s everything. The Michigan primary has the current crop of politicians stating the obvious: the state’s in trouble, and promising the banal: the plan out of unemployment is retraining. Okay so far, we don’t disagree.

But. In case you didn’t know, and I sure didn’t, the leading black hole darlings for investor capital continue to be dot coms, like, well, YouTube. Purchased by Google in 2006 for $One-with-a-B billion. Spread out over about 60 employees. No, I can’t do the math.

Or take Craigslist, the online classifeds upstart that’s almost singlehandedly spiked the revenue stream that supported in large part the metro newspaper heartbeat. At year’s end in ’06, Craigslist was cranking 24/7 with slightly more than 22 butts in seats.

Skype, the voice over internet telecom bought by eBay, was being run by a little over 200 people at the time, compared to tens, maybe hundreds of thousands of traditional telecom workers.

Here’s the point: the politicos promise “retraining”, in what fields who knows, but you can forget about anything meaningful if it involves computers, which is what they seem to favor waving in front of out-of-work focus groups because those flat screen monitors are sure shiny. The examples above are all code based enterprise, and coders seem to be synonymous with Third World pennies-a-day compensation. The same for data entry – available over the web for less than a pack of gum.

The only obvious connection I can draw to powersports is to consider your customer base, and where it’s going to come from down the road. It almost certainly doesn’t have a Bangladesh area code.