Latvian, one of the three Baltic languages along with Estonian and Lithuanian, is now listed as a source language by over 100 firms. We’ve come a long way from my youth, when I considered Latvian a smugglers' language. We spoke it at home, but Latvian was a second language even in Latvia, having been suppressed by force-fed Russian. In fact, the Russians of my childhood referred to Latvian as sobacij yazik, or dog's language.
| Freivalds: You'll need to know 'whereas-speak' at The Club |  |
Published September 14th, 2018
By John Freivalds
Lakeshore Weekly News- Savage, MN
Buy low, sell high. The best sale is a good purchase. High prices cure high prices; low prices cure low prices. If you watch the pennies, the dollars will take care of themselves.
Dem's da words of wisdom I learned from my super-wealthy boss at The Grain Exchange, where I worked when I came to Minneapolis many moons ago. The language I learned was short, sweet and precise. I even learned the sign language of trading grain on the floor of the exchange which was even more precise — you know all that hand waving with outstretched fingers and closed fists.
| How dropping out has become in |  |
Published 9/31/2018
By John Freivalds
Margo Brown was 42 in 1986 and her job at a Fortune 500 big pharma firm wasn't satisfying. So with little research, but a lot of wanderlust, she decided to travel around Asia for a year. She didn't have tons of money so she was going to stay in hostels and take the cheapest transport she could. John, her father, was a respected lifer and successful trader at Cargill, raised in Aurora on the Iron Range where you got one job and stayed with it for the rest of your life. He didn't get his daughter at all. He, like many of Margo's nay saying friends, said you are throwing your career away with this move. But Margo told him she had to get out so she could get in. She needed time to think and not about the next Power Point presentation. He didn't believe her.
Freivalds: In Twitter we trust (Hey! What happened to God?) |
 |
Published 9/1/2018
The Roanoke Times, Roanoke, VA
By John Freivalds
My first experience with the power of technology came almost 50 years ago. There was no internet, fax, call waiting, watts lines, caller ID just the phone. My boss in the grain business wanted to know how much of this specialty flour a local competitor was producing. And he wanted the info in two days so he could present it to the marketing council. What to do?
Armed with whatever else I could pick up about the company at the library (remember no Google around then) I called the company at lunch time and got through to the plant manager asked "I am from marketing research and need to know the last three years production runs?" He answered "why don't you call so and so in Chicago? (The company's headquarters)." I said "I did, everyone's out to lunch." Then he said "OK" and gave me the numbers.
|
Join me in seeing Latvia — and Russian threats against it — as real |
 |
To most Americans, my native country and even NATO are abstractions, but there are real life-or-death considerations.
Published 7/12/2018
By John Freivalds
Minneapolis Star Tribune
To most Minnesotans, Latvia, along with Lithuania and Estonia, are geographic abstractions. The three Baltic States will be a testing ground to see if the U.S. honors its commitments to NATO. I have no doubt that Russian President Vladimir Putin — with whom President Donald Trump is to meet next week for a summit in Finland — will at some point provoke some sort of incident to justify intervention. Latvia and Estonia have a large percentage of Russian migrant workers who were brought in by Josef Stalin to staff now-defunct Soviet enterprises. They have to learn the local language to become citizens, yet Russia doesn’t want them back. They are an irritation to us Latvians and an opportunity to Putin.