08:46 – The morning paper reports that the DA will not prosecute a young man who on Monday beat his father to death with a length of steel pipe. The DA concluded that the young man was acting in self-defense and defense of his mother. The dead man had a long history of domestic violence. As terrible as this is for the young man and his mother, it brought a smile to my face. I love to see stories about wife- and child-beaters being beaten to death themselves. That’s true justice, something our so-called justice system almost never delivers.
Work on the prepping book continues. At the moment, I’m writing about vigilance committees and the power, in the absence of competent authority, of any elected or appointed government official, inside or outside law enforcement, in the legislative, judicial, or executive branches of any level of government to deputize civilians during an emergency.
13:27 – Well, it’s been a pretty good day so far. We’ve shipped three science kits, including two to the same person in Australia. I’ve also received three exciting emails, the first telling me that I’ve been accepted to Who’s Who, the second telling me that I can get my doctorate on-line, and the third telling me that I can earn $4,000 per month working at home. I’ll take care of the first two later today. I deleted the third one, because I already earn more than $4,000 per month working at home.
Apropos prepping: St. Louis Schools – Townships Warn Residents to STOCK UP ON WATER, FOOD, MEDICINE Before #MikeBrown Decision
On the writing front, nothing beats Jerome Irving Rodale’s “Synonym Finder”. It has such a complete list of close and distant synonyms, including related words and meanings, that it has never been beaten. Unfortunately, the Rodale Press has never created an electronic version for computers.
But recently, I saw a write-up by someone who had tested all available synonym finders, and demonstrated by posting the returns of each, that Thesaurus.com was second to Rodale. There is a Firefox search engine plug-in for Thesaurus.com which I have been using for a couple months now, instead of taking the time to pull the Rodale compendium off the shelf. Only a couple of times since then, have I needed to get the Rodale book out.
BTW, I only recently discovered Firefox shortcuts to the search engine dialog: Ctrl-K puts you up there; hold Ctrl and use up/down arrows to cycle through the search engines in your list. That has really sped up my use of the search engines.
Here we go again. The Wall Street Journal announced yesterday morning, that it will close their radio division that has been chugging along and has continued growing since its founding in 1980 and unto this day; the same with the US print Sunday Journal and the Turkish and German websites. Understand, NOT because any one of those is not making money AND growing, but because none of them are growing ‘rapidly enough’.
http://jimromenesko.com/2014/11/12/wall-street-journal-to-drop-sunday-journal-and-wall-street-journal-radio-network/#more-80036
This is exactly why super large corporations like the despicable Rupert Murdoch and his News Corp should be decimated into much smaller units, and similar overly large conglomerates broken down. It is not clear exactly how many people will be unemployed on 31 December, but over one hundred folks work in those combined operations that will be closed. We need incentives to stop corporations from doing stuff like this, over and over again, in an economy that already is not providing enough jobs.
In America, it is not enough to make money and provide hundreds with jobs, you have to make a financial killing before any enterprise is worth saving. What is not worth saving are large conglomerates.
And those of you who just voted Republican are 100% insuring that this stuff will continue with abandon. Just watch.
Hey, OFD: Howie Carr is done at WRKO!
http://www.bostonglobe.com/lifestyle/names/2014/11/12/howie-carr-done-wrko/MOMHe0yzDSFNPKE6N10dXJ/story.html
“No more of this, thank you.”
Google intends to start charging you $9.99/mo to listen to YouTube music that has formerly been free, but super-manager Irving Azoff plans on pulling 20,000 songs by 42 artists he represents, and they are important ones.
http://www.allaccess.com/net-news/archive/story/135517/irving-azoff-threatens-to-derail-youtube-subscript
Most interesting is the picture in that article that shows an Azoff tweet that posts how much money key executives at Pandora make, as opposed to what the artists Pandora plays get.
Not that Azoff does not want you to pay for listening — he does — but until he reaches a payment deal with Google, lots of music will disappear.
And those of you who just voted Republican are 100% insuring that this stuff will continue with abandon. Just watch.
And why is this the Republicans fault? Do you want to move the USA to socialism? Oh wait, I forgot.
And even the socialists of France and Germany are changing their societies also. Nothing lasts forever. If something is not allowed to change within the box then it will go into hysteresis and rip the box apart to make things change. In human societies that is usually called a revolution and they are messy and bloody.
BTW, I blame it all on the internet.
I blame women’s fashion. Especially shoes!
And those of you who just voted Republican are 100% insuring that this stuff will continue with abandon. Just watch.
Some of the biggest supporters of the Democrats are rich people. George Soros, much of the Silicon Valley people, the entertainment industry, etc. It’s not just Republicans that support business.
Heck, everyone applauds Warren Buffet because he opposed abolition of the estate tax. That’s because one of Berkshire Hathaway’s biggest divisions is in life insurance, which is frequently used by the well-off to pay estate taxes. In addition, he has done any number of acquisitions of family owned businesses by BH on the death of the founder, because a big tax bill was due. It cuts all ways.
Nah, it’s neither R’s nor D’s – it’s the entire MBA business culture that has developed in the past 30 years or so. Without going into any identifiable detail, we deal quite a lot with a European company that has exactly the same mentality:
– Making money slowly and steadily, year after year, just isn’t good enough. That’s not how managers earn bonuses.
– Virtually the entire workforce consists of “temps”. Even people who have worked there for years are officially “temporary”. This has the advantage that the company doesn’t have to pay any benefits. This doesn’t apply to the managers, of course.
– It’s all short-term. Do anything you can to get this quarter’s numbers up, including cannibalizing sales for next quarter, or stealing business from another branch of the same company.
– Marketing is king. Let’s open a Twitter account. Twitter didn’t work, let’s do Facebook! A few months later, Facebook is forgotten: the marketing hamsters have moved on to the next sparkly idea.
Over the years we have watched the marketing department dash from one brilliant idea to the next, flushing untold millions down the toilet. Meanwhile, their products – once innovative – have been overtaken by the competition. Need I add that they didn’t develop the products they sell? They bought up a smaller company to get those products.
It’s sad, really…
One of the managers we know doesn’t even like the products they sell. It’s all just numbers in a spreadsheet, any manager can manage anything. And that mentality is precisely the problem with modern business management…
BTW, I blame it all on the internet.
There you go, blaming Al Gore again.
Let us always remember that corporations don’t exist to provide a public service, to create jobs, or to provide people with benefits. Corporations exist to make a profit and drive shareholder value. Anyone that thinks anything else (which, apparently, is a large number of people) is naive.
Well, as I’ve said in the past, I don’t think corporations should exist. The whole idea of fictitious corporate “persons” is stupid.
Wasn’t that done for liability reasons? A corporation has to legally function as its own entity (i.e. person) so that that it can issue its own checks, own its own property, and so forth that that stuff can in turn be owned by the shareholders. Likewise, if the corporation goes bankrupt then just the corporation and no actual people go bankrupt. Otherwise, there would be a lot of small business owners with failed businesses living on the street. I don’t know how else you get around the concept of a business owning stuff and people owning a piece of that business with limited liability. Otherwise, all businesses are just sole proprietorships and partnerships operating as DBAs.
That’s what LLCs are for.
Well, yes, but why do you find an LLC better than a corporation? As far as I know (we are an LLC) the differences are mostly tax-oriented technical things. An LLC is still a way for people to shield themselves from company liability. And the company can still take actions, own property, do transactions, etc. as a separate entity.
Because LLCs are strictly limited in number of members, which is also why I would outlaw corporate ownership/membership of LLCs.
IRS says there is no limit on how many members an LLC can have…
http://www.irs.gov/Businesses/Small-Businesses-&-Self-Employed/Limited-Liability-Company-LLC
I suppose that may vary by state to some degree. Also, what’s the difference between an LLC with 75 members and a corporation with 75 shareholders?
I was under the impression that NC restricted membership like Subchapter S corporations, but perhaps not. The difference is that the LLC is administratively like a partnership rather than a corporation. For example, this is from the NC summary of LLCs:
“Membership in a limited liability company entails certain rights and responsibilities. Unless stated otherwise in the Articles of Organization or the Operating Agreement, these rights include the ability to, upon the vote, approval, agreement, or consent of all members:
o Adopt or amend an operating agreement;
o Admit any person as a member;
o Sell, transfer or otherwise dispose of all or substantially all of the assets of the limited
liability company prior to the dissolution of the limited liability company; and
o Merger the limited liability company into or with another limited liability company or
other business entity.”
Note the “all members”.
Kindner Morgan is a very big LLC. $258 million in net revenue in 2013. I have no idea how many shareholders but probably at least 100,000.
http://finance.yahoo.com/q?s=KMR
I have no idea what state their LLC is registered in, but for all practical purposes you can’t do that in NC. People can’t buy and sell LLC stock. Each member of an NC LLC has to be approved unanimously by the other members. “upon the vote, approval, agreement, or consent of ALL members”. Emphasis mine.
True, stock sales are difficult. Not impossible, but you won’t find Los on the stock exchange. Never thought about it, as for us, it’s just my wife and me.
“Hey, OFD: Howie Carr is done at WRKO!”
I read his columns online at the Boston Herald site anyway. Plus, he’s got a good half-dozen books out on the old Boston mob scene which are a blast to read. Dunno why the radio station nabobs would let his contract end; he has a huge listener base.
“In America, it is not enough to make money and provide hundreds with jobs, you have to make a financial killing before any enterprise is worth saving.”
There it is. I agree. And in Mordor, it’s actual sport and entertainment to destroy people and their reputations and watch people suffer. We have that on gospel reportage from many victims of it over the years. As for corporate ass-hats, yup; it ain’t enough to make a reasonable profit and provide jobs and sustain communities; they have to really make a massive killing and destroy all competition, whatever it takes. And if it means dumping Murkan workers for underpaid Turd World serfs, hey, what a deal! They can buy another yacht or move up to a ritzier country club and buy more jewelry for their trophy bitches.
I agree with brad’s summary above; what a racket, if you’re in upper management and/or ownership. Otherwise you’re just shit.
Isn’t there a rule that if a company has more than 500 shareholders it must become a publicly traded company?
In Indiana stockholders in LLC’s are not allowed; only members. And the members are treated as an Indiana partnership.
When I was much younger and starting out in business, I worked freelance with another guy in doing video work. We were just 2 individuals with no formal arrangement. However, I used to refer to the guy I worked with as a ‘partner’ — e.g. “My partner will take care of that detail.” My dad, the lawyer, heard me saying that once on the phone, and came down hard on me. “You guys are not a partnership. Don’t ever refer to yourself or him as a partner if you are not a legal partnership. It can get you into trouble.”
Okay. I did not think it was that big of a deal, but okay. I knew other people who worked the same way we did and referred to themselves as partners in doing the work, but if it is that important, I will stop doing that. Guess you have to be a lawyer to really understand what that is all about.
My son and longtime girlfriend are not married, but refer to themselves as “partners”. While talking with someone, I once referred to “his partner”, and immediately got the response, “Oh, he’s gay?”
Guess I have a lot yet to learn about that word “partner”.
Yeah, “partner” nowadays either implies that it’s an unmarried couple, either straight or gay, but more likely gay. What I find outlandish is gay guys referring to “my wife” or “my husband,” and ditto gay women; it’s just too dang weird for me.
Isn’t there a rule that if a company has more than 500 shareholders it must become a publicly traded company?
That is a Sub S corp. LLCs are totally different beasties.
Chuck,
I HATE online dictionaries and thesauri — they always miss the connotations and etymology. Give me my Chambers dictionary any day of the week.
If you”re looking for something slightly different than a printed version of Roget’s, try:
http://www.amazon.com/Hartrampfs-vocabularies-relatives-simplified-profession/dp/B00087RN1E
http://www.abebooks.com/servlet/BookDetailsPL?bi=13682810522
Very amusing, better than Old Farmer’s Almanac for bathroom reading.
This is a Gutenberg download, and kind of fun all by itself:
1811 Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue by Francis Grose
http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/5402
None of those downloads have any images, looks like; which one did you grab, jim`?
Just pulled them off my shelves and hunted down the titles.
Hartrampf’s is 1936, _Vulgar Tongue_ is ’63.
Do you have the Chambers Dictionary?
http://www.chambers.co.uk/dictionaries/the-chambers-dictionary.php
http://www.amazon.com/The-Chambers-Dictionary-13th-Edition/dp/1473602254
Any edition will do, just be sure they are the true Chambers:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chambers_Dictionary
Another fun one is
http://www.abebooks.com/Etymological-English-Dictionary-Chamberss-MacDonald-Littlefield/13249553560/bd
While my comment is awaiting moderation, I’ll assume you have an older edition of Fowler’s _Modern English Usage_? That gives me the giggles whenever I pick it up.
I’ve got a giant Random House dictionary and once had the two-volume compact OED but I’ll have to find those you listed; they do look like a lotta fun and laffs. I’m a big fan of archaic English usage and old-time slang; thanks for those links.
I had the Fowlers but have lost it somewhere in our travels; I also had the Skeats, also lost now.
Isn’t there a rule that if a company has more than 500 shareholders it must become a publicly traded company?
IIRC, there is a threshold around there where certain public accounting forms have to be filed with the IRS. So while it may be closely held, it has to disclose some of the financial details of the company.
What the heck is Skeats? Going to have to look that one up!
Chambers is wonderful for old, archaic words and some definitions are chuckleworthy.
I seem to recall the humor got removed from later editions of Fowler; not sure of that though.
_Vulgar Tongue_ is fun and free — just don’t read it on your iPhone while waiting in line at the bank because you’ll be bound to lol and then you’d have to explain…
OFD, OMG! How could I have missed Skeat???
Question is: do I want the 1882 or 1901 version?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walter_William_Skeat
http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/author/4590
Too late! Just ordered the HB 1901 version. Neat find, thanks!
LOL, who the hell studies philology these days?
Grimmly Yours,
jim`
I peek at philology pretty regularly, almost daily, and have for decades. It was one of the fun things about being an English major and grad student that the ass-hat neo-Marxists couldn’t take away from me, but they looked down on it as “reactionary” and possibly “fascist.” You probably know that Camille Paglia thinks highly of it and talks about how she was trained early by the works of German and English philologists and how they influenced her thinking about art and language.
I enjoy finding new words and the more archaic the better and finding a way to use them in writing and speech if I can. It bugs the shit out of lots of people, evidently.
A related field is that of lexicographer, which Samuel Johnson in his great “Dictionary” defined as a “harmless drudge.”
See the late Mr. Onions as well:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Oxford_Dictionary_of_English_Etymology
You collect stamps?
Unless you’re just joshing me, philately is the stamp collecting thing, and yeah, I did that as a kid for years. Both my world and U.S. stamp albums were lost in one or another cellar flood up here.
Just kidding. As I think I’ve mentioned, I have two Doctor of Philology degrees, or something like that.
Wow, so you’re a really advanced stamp collector, too!
Do you gots the upside-down airplane stamp?
I collected international stamps as a kid and got a wealth of knowledge about geography and history; the most irritating thing about their loss to me is the stamps I had from countries that don’t exist anymore in Europe, particularly, like the old Bosnia-Herzogovina, etc. Plus some fairly early U.S. stamps, and I had branched out to first-day covers, most of those lost now, too.
Philology: @jim`
You gots “Brewer’s Dictionary of Phrase and Fable”? Or Charles Funk’s “Thereby Hangs a Tale,” and “A Hog On Ice and Other Curious Expressions”? (illustrations by brother Tom Funk, yes, both of the Funk & Wagnall’s publications)
Oh, is that what it’s called when one of the damn cats goes down there and pisses all over everything?
Jeez, if a cat produced that much whiz you’d have to condemn the structure and level it, incinerate the ruins and then salt the ground or sumthin.
One of our previous houses was on a hill and between snow melt from above, heavy rains, and the tree roots clogging the underground PVC drainage tubes, the basement got flooded twice; we lost a bunch of stuff. When the Roto-Rooter guys came out, one of them mentioned that they knew the house and had been there before; thanks a lot, previous owners, for not cluing us to the tree root issue. Other fun times we had there: lightning striking the transformer on the pole out front, which we saw happen; giant blue flash and then a cloud of steam. A full-grown 12-point buck deer in the tree line out back standing up to our (previous idiot) golden retriever who was barking at him; said retriever getting skunked, which I saw happen under the street light one night; you’d be amazed how high and how far the skunk spray goes; at least 15 feet out and 6 feet high. Said retriever also getting nicely stuck all over with porcupine quills, a joy to remove, one by one. And our cars being broken into and things stolen one night shortly after we moved in. Oh, and having the Volvo station wagon backed into one of our son’s friends’ car so that it rolled back down the driveway, across the street and smacked into a neighbor’s house. And watching that happen, too, unable to do anything.
Cats we have now are all housebroken and not a problem. And no more flooded cellars. Life is grand!