Most cottage food laws not only prohibit wholesale distribution through a retailer, but also direct online sales. For example in Michigan, you can't take orders over the internet, even on your own website. Selling on Etsy is unheard off, I'm still not aware of any other state than West Virginia allowing that.
Maybe cottage industry is a term I need to use more. With the internet and all that, I think it ought to be easier to just make money from home, not harder.
We need to actively try to reverse some of these trends towards centralization and big business stamping out small business. These are some of the sources of our ills in the world today and it makes me crazy that if a rich person talks about their ideas for solutions, it's framed like they are nice people are some nonsense. If a poor person does the same thing, it's framed like they are nutcase revolutionaries or something.
I've studied certain things for a lot of years and have lived experience to inform my mental models and I'm flabbergasted that people are so openly hostile to talking about solutions. They just want to whine and when you propose solutions, they get all up in arms and try to shut that conversation down.
Why? I don't get it. Do people just like being miserable and sitting around doing nothing while waiting for the world to burn to the ground?
If someone comes to me with an idea for an idea of how to solve a problem in a space I know well and (as far as I know) they don’t know as well, my comments are likely to be at least 2:1 negative:positive. It doesn’t do them any good for me to tell them how awesome it would be for their idea to revolutionize the world. They already feel that. They more likely need to here where they’re likely to struggle or refine/test their idea before sinking thousands of hours into it.
Maybe that’s a possible underlying (positively motivated) driver for the negativity you experience?
Communication can be hard.