10:05 – Chilly weather continues. When I took Colin out and got the paper this morning, it was 26F (-3C) with strong gusty winds. As usual, after he peed Colin started mole hunting, pouncing when he smelled or heard something and sticking his snout down into the turf.
We don’t overlook long-term food storage for Colin. If things get bad, he’ll eat dog food until he runs out of it, and then start eating what we eat. We store his dog food in a large airtight plastic bin that keeps it good for several months, but there there are the dog biscuits, which come in a cardboard box. Barbara just opened a new box of those and transferred them to a bunch of Costco nut jars, carefully supervised by Colin the whole time.
I understand that the federal government has us at an elevated threat level under NTAS. They’ve warned that ISIS may plan widespread “lone wolf” attacks over the Thanksgiving holiday. The only specific target I’ve seen mentioned is the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade, which may be targeted by terrorists driving trucks into crowds, but of course this could happen anywhere that crowds gather. Of course, they may also use guns and bombs per their usual.
I’m not expecting terrorist attacks to be widespread, but I’d be surprised if there weren’t at least one or two. Stay away from crowds.
Speaking of crowds, this review of the law is helpful if you find yourself driving into a riot or “peaceful demonstration.”
https://www.uslawshield.com/caught-in-a-demonstration-know-what-to-do-ahead-of-time/
n
BTW, if you are a CHL holder, or even if you just carry in your car or are blessed with constitutional carry, I recommend you subscribe to or join one of the several ‘gun owners legal defense clubs’ or organizations. There are several, but it should provide you with a lawyer for any gun related trouble, provide expert witnesses, and generally exists to help you defend yourself legally in the aftermath of a shooting. I am a member of TX LAW SHIELD, but have no experience of others, so cannot offer a specific endorsement. If you take a class from some instructors they will offer membership in something of this style too, particularly Massad Ayoob’s organization.
Could be the sporty-ness is gettting started, could be coincidence. Weird that the city names all based on “saint”….
http://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2016/11/gladstone-mo-police-officer-shot-traffic-stop-4th-police-shooting-sunday/
”
Gladstone, MO Police Officer Shot During Traffic Stop – 4th Police Shooting on Sunday
Jim Hoft Nov 21st, 2016 6:59 am
A Gladstone, Missouri police officer was shot during a traffic stop on Sunday night.
This was the fourth police shooting of the day.
4 police officers shot today
– San Antonio, TX
– Sanibel, FL
– St. Louis, MO
– Gladstone, MO
Pray for our nation’s law enforcement ♀️
— Assist The Officer (@atofortworth) November 21, 2016
** A St. Louis police sergeant was shot twice in the face tonight in an ambush shooting on Hampton Avenue and Pernod.
The suspect was later killed last night in a shootout with police.
** A San Antonio police officer was shot dead during an ambush attack this morning.
** A police officer was shot in in a drive-by assassination attempt in Sanibel, Florida Sunday night.”
The SA murder suspect appears to be Black from the surveillance shot. Calling Sharpless! Calling Jackwagon! Zzz zzz zzz
Australia had the misfortune to have a liberal Liberal Prime Minister from 1975-83 named Malcolm Fraser. He was economically illiterate, but one of his worst crimes was letting in a lot of moooslems from Lebanon. Now their kids and grandkids are comming back to bite us. Sydney in particular has some extremely vicious Lebanese gangs that like nothing better than raping teenage girls. And there’s this:
http://www.abc.net.au/news/2016-11-21/peter-dutton-fraser-made-mistake-resettling-lebanese-refugees/8043624
Looks like SteveF probably has 18″ of snow on the ground. IIRC, he lives near Binghampton, NY.
We are six hours northeast of Mr. SteveF’s location and had a night of blowing snow and freezing rain mix which continues all day today, with wind gusts approaching 50 MPH so fah. One of the contractors was here at 08:00 to work on the studio windows and stayed until noon; most of the time inside with the wood stove out there going. Bless his little hardcore Vermonter haht.
One of wife’s pay checks is now well beyond overdue and the other is just coming overdue and they have so far either lied to her or miscommunicated when they were cut, sent out, how they were sent out, etc., and we’re of course broke three days before T-Day. She is religious about doing her invoices correctly and sending them in as soon as she’s back from an assignment, and then they evidently disappear into Limbo for a while. Sometimes wife will call a week later to make sure they got it OK and they haven’t even looked for it yet let alone done anything. Or she’ll call again two or three weeks later and the idiot office staff will tell her they have a question now about a 50-cent parking charge on it. Can’t send it ahead without clarification, doncha know.
So here we sit, and no idea what the Princess plans are for this week, either. Her typical M.O. is to call the Day Of, and suddenly demand this or that for money or a ride or whatever, guaranteed it will inconvenience as many other people as possible.
Ill-mannered and annoying ranting over for now. Out to brave the gusts of ice in the face and grab more firewood.
Nice here, 73F and 61%RH. Sunny.
n
Or she’ll call again two or three weeks later and the idiot office staff will tell her they have a question now about a 50-cent parking charge on it.
Our worst client was an agency in San Antonio that had a multi-million dollar contract with the Army. We were subcontracted to deliver leadership training over a year period. We were supposed to get paid monthly, including travel. We were still living in SA, and it turned out to be a total cluster fuck with these people. Constant missing invoices, receipts, they needed paper copies of invoices (I hand carried to them *multiple* times). We went through this for a year, carrying travel expenses, etc. My wife finally called a Two-Star in charge of the program via back channels. He in turn ripped them a new asshole and threatened to cancel the contract. We had a check for over $100K in less than a week. Knowing people helps. Try to find an *Angel* at your wife’s agency. It can be hard, but when you make that friend, things flow a lot faster.
Nice here, 73F and 61%RH. Sunny.
We were 36 F last Saturday night in the Land of Sugar. Bitterly cold. The roof was well frosted on Sunday morning.
I am unpleasantly remembering Christmas of 1989 in the Land of Sugar. 6 F and a 30 mph wind out of the North. This year seems similar …
@ofd, one thing you might consider is using a factor. A factor will buy your invoices (at a slight discount) for immediate cash. A friend of mine was working as field service for a mid sized company, and it was the same story you get. He began the process with a factor, and the simple threat (announcement that that was his next step) got upper management involved and there was no more screwing around. He’s been with them for a couple of years now, and gets paid on time.
Given the nature of her employer, you shouldn’t have any trouble finding a factor.
nick
That’s just a little more than a light dusting for their area.
“Try to find an *Angel* at your wife’s agency. It can be hard, but when you make that friend, things flow a lot faster.”
She thinks she may have got one lately but there is so much idiocy with the office staff and higher-ups who sign the checks (need TWO signers) and people out on vay-cay, retreats, sick days, personal days, holidays, snow days in Mordor, etc., etc. that even that Angel can’t seem to fight the mountains of sludge.
“Given the nature of her employer, you shouldn’t have any trouble finding a factor.”
Possibly, but she and others there worry about being canned over any such attempts to make their lives easier and more logical. It’s been made abundantly clear, apparently, that they can be dumped and hordes of willing instructors are waiting in the wings to take those jobs. Wife and three others are SENIOR instructors and have been contractors for them nearly since the beginning and have never got a raise and have actually had their pay cut a few years back and never replaced. Instead of rewarding seniority, professionalism and the sheer numbers of classes of instructors taught by wife and those others over the last seven years, they bring in new people, often idiots with mental problems of their own, but they’re friends with the manager/coordinator of all this stuff. In one case an ex-gf that he’d lived with for three years. And they pay the new instructors even LESS.
But wife is the sole main support here and is both terrified of losing her gig and also stressed because of all this unnecessary shit that she goes through on top of all the travel and teaching those classes (very intense) all year.
This is not what I had in mind when we got married; I figured my professional IT career was good for many years to come and she was happy doing her public health stuff and our double income would carry us merrily along. And it did until I lost the state job and then she lost her state job and from that point on, 2002- forward, it’s been a roller coaster of layoffs, part-time and minimum-wage shit jobs, and being mostly unemployed for me, and a bunch of stress for her.
So if the Fed job doesn’t pan out real soon, I’m back to working on generating other sources of revenue here and devoting full-time to it.
Snow has stopped for the moment, but it’s a winta wunda-land out there and the winds and gusts continue from the north. The bay looks like a choppy ocean harbor, but the roads are mostly clear and the stove is blazing away, with the temp inside the house 65-68 and still half the windows not done yet and no oil heat turned on.
It is unbelievable that Mrs. OFD’s employer doesn’t use EFT. The employees obviously have to travel frequently. Sending a check to someone on the road doesn’t work. Even our lowly company uses bill.com to pay consultants.
“2002- forward, it’s been a roller coaster of layoffs, part-time and minimum-wage shit jobs, and being mostly unemployed for me, and a bunch of stress for her.”
That’s a good summary of middle-class woes under Bush and Obama.
“2002- forward, it’s been a roller coaster of layoffs, part-time and minimum-wage s*** jobs, and being mostly unemployed for me, and a bunch of stress for her.”
That’s a good summary of middle-class woes under Bush and Obama.
That is what happens when you have 65 million immigrants over 20 to 30 years. Gonna get worse IMHO despite Trump as the recession deepens.
“It is unbelievable that Mrs. OFD’s employer doesn’t use EFT.”
She’s not actually an employee of them; she’s an independent consultant. They do direct deposit for themselves and the incompetent office staff and then screw around for weeks to get the checks out to the consultant instructors who bring in ALL THEIR FUCKING REVENUE to the tune of MILLIONS nowadays, WAY UP from when they first started.
“That’s a good summary of middle-class woes under Bush and Obama.”
It’s definitely gotten worse for us over the last ten to fifteen years; you can SEE it and HEAR it out here away from the MSM regime propagandists. My next-younger brother and I are in the same boat; brother next down from him has worked TWO jobs and only slept in five-minute increments until recently, when he lost one of the two, and supporting himself, our sister, and her son. She hasn’t worked in many years and collects some kind of bennies from the Commonwealth. And youngest brother has slaved for twenty years for the same real estate insurance company, the only one of us to keep the same job for so long.
In the 1960s our dad worked the one job, making maybe $13k/year, and that supported a wife, five kids, fairly decent houses in the Boston suburbs and small towns, and the cah. We had the three hots and a cot, birthdays and Xmas gifts (not to the extreme that it is now), and played outside and had loads of fun outside skool most of the time. He took us on trips to Boston, the airports, and I went with him on his job a bunch of times all over southeastern MA and Rhode Island. Went to church on Sundays (Episcopal, 1928 BCP) and participated in small town events, and I was a regular customer at the libraries, along with my mom.
It’s largely turned to a day-to-day struggle to get by now for many of us out here, and we expect some kind of giant hammer to fall on us every day, too. Their war on the middle class has been a resounding success and they’ve either deliberately and through malice aforethought killed the golden goose that lays the golden eggs, or they’ve stupidly just let us die. Offshore our jobs, move everything else to cheaper overseas locations, and get busy with the robots. Maybe we can all be on a guaranteed income dole of some kind, finally in total dependence on Our Nanny, the Almighty State.
All they require is obedience, acquiescence for their various programs, projects, innovations and novelties, and from time to time giving up one or more of our children for their imperial wars.
“Trump Election Gives America a Front-Row Seat to See Liberalism on Display”
http://www.rushlimbaugh.com/daily/2016/11/21/trump_election_gives_america_a_front_row_seat_to_see_liberalism_on_display
“RUSH: Democrat actors have been attacking Republican elected officials in theaters, I don’t know what, since 1865. The first known instance of a radical leftist Democrat actor attacking a Republican elected official was John Wilkes Booth assassinating Abraham Lincoln at Ford’s Theatre in Washington, 1865. So these guys at Hamilton are following in what I’m sure they consider to be a rich tradition. But the condescension of thinking that they are telling the vice-president-elect how to do it, how to be, what to think.”
Speaking of Hamilton and Murkan history and related matters, lotsa good stuff today at:
https://www.lewrockwell.com/
About once or twice a week there’s a slew of interesting articles and viewpoints there, other days, just a lotta tedious stuff to wade through. This is a good day.
I especially liked the piece on lefties whining how Trump hasn’t come up with any potential black appointees. (spoiler: they hate, loathe and despise black conservatives).
Awesome:
TSUNAMI WARNING IN JAPAN After 7.3 Mag Earthquake Near Fukushima
Nov 21st, 2016 4:02 pm by Jim Hoft
A 7.3 magnitude earthquake struck today 37 kilometers from Fukushima, Japan.
Just what the world needs now….
n
Yeah, the Ring of Fire. Probably gonna be a few more geologic events coming up soon around that Ring.
Then there’s the New Madrid fault.
We don’t live up here in a major quake zone but we’ve had tremors in the past, usually epi-centered in Quebec somewhere. And Boston had a major quake in the 18th-C that my ggggggggggggg-grandpa Franklin commented on.
Generally good advice, regardless of any “threat levels” coming out of the security theater.
Where can I get a Sharpton mask? Just in case I decide I need to shoot a cop or something…
No, about half an inch. I’m a bit north of Albany. Most everyone around us got 4-24″, but it just gave us a miss.
Not at all. Relying on “easily losable” paper lets them sit on the float for that much longer. Electronic records are distressingly auditable.
That damned Anthropogenic Global Warming! Is there no mischief it cannot perpetrate?
“Not at all. Relying on “easily losable” paper lets them sit on the float for that much longer. Electronic records are distressingly auditable.”
That is what I suspect and have told her. Place is run by a certain ethnic group I won’t mention here but are infamous for that kinda chit; same deal with my last full-time IT job at that shit-hole factory a couple of years ago up here. Wouldn’t spend a penny on critical IT infrastructure and expected one guy to do the work of three and get up to speed yesterday on the whole enchilada and work 80 hours a week.
“Is there no mischief it cannot perpetrate?”
Latest bumf has 10-foot tsunami waves and failure of the power plant’s cooling system.
lets them sit on the float
Float is probably a trivial amount. What is probably happening is the company is playing games with their cash flow. Makes their balance sheet look better.
Or they are just incompetent.
Well, the float probably is small but it IS on the scale of millions now, quite a rise from when my wife started with them and it was only her and four or five other instructors. Now they have 35 or 40 and they charge two grand for each student in a class and there are anywhere from ten to thirty students in each class and they run dozens every month all over the country.
So yeah, I’m guessing if not the float then they’re screwing around with the cash flow and balance sheet but sheer incompetence and laziness is at the top, too. The office staff handing invoices and checks and suchlike couldn’t make a soup sandwich if their lives depended on it, and it’s been like this for years, always getting worse, never better, even after they added a third party to the mix for sending in the invoices. Then they need TWO of the top “executives” to sign the checks, and one or the other is never around. You’d think that it would occur to them that it’s my wife and her colleagues who make the whole organization run at all. And the very topmost princess rakes in $600,000/year and does PR chit down in Mordor, basically.
Here are some of the culprits:
https://www.thenationalcouncil.org/about/national-mental-health-association/executives/
They have you by the shorthairs since they use independent contractors. “We don’t need your services any longer.” There is nothing you can do. It is a shame they treat their bread & butter like that.
It might be worthwhile for the senior trainers to chat with the so-called decision makers of the paying clients, to either point up problems with the company or to feel them out about a new company consisting of the old company’s best trainers and minimal overhead. There are a bunch of ways that could backfire, though.
I agree with MrAtoz and Mr. SteveF on their points. The contractors are at the mercy of the ass-hats who pay them. And apparently believe that any of the contractors, no matter how senior and experienced and revenue-producing, can be easily replaced and paid even less.
The other senior trainers are even MORE terrified of losing their gigs and thus useless for presenting any kind of unified front to “management.” I’ve brought up the idea of her and the others or just her going totally independent but it’s been a non-starter so far. My previous wife did that with her law firm when she eventually learned that they’d keep her as an “associate” forever thanks to their old-boy network. So she and two or three others simply split and formed their own law firm down there in NJ.
It is what it is, and wife has burnout days like all of us and is getting too old to fuss about going through what all that would take; would prefer to find a way to produce some revenue via her arts and crafts jewelry stuff and painting. And I need to go a similar route as full-time IT working for ass-hats ain’t gonna fly anymore, unless the Fed gig pans out, which I doubt. Should know more by the end of the month, though.
Whatevuh.
I guy with whom I play golf was the comptroller at a big, name brand state University. He once told me that he proposed moving an account to Seattle, in order to play the float on the checks the University issued. He took the idea into a meeting with the Dean for “running the business of the university” and the President, and explained that the potential income was close to $3,000,000 / year. The first words our of the President’s mouth was “The local banks give us more than that every year in donations.” Meeting over.
Why not devote some time to generating other sources of revenue now? It will make the time go faster.
“The first words our of the President’s mouth was “The local banks give us more than that every year in donations.” Meeting over.”
And at too many places now, including banks, the answer would have been “Hey, why not? Grab an extra $3 million, too!” And it would go to administration b.s. and more spiffy innovations and novelties, more coloring books and crayons for the snowflakes, and inviting BLM speakers.
“Why not devote some time to generating other sources of revenue now?”
I am, kinda, but I also need to be ready to ramp up fast on their IT and meanwhile I have a bunch of family and medical and VA issues here this month and continuing…..hard to focus…
It’s Tuesday, with light snow flurries, contractor here supposedly gonna finish up on the studio windows today, and we’re headed down to White River Junction VA Med Center for my second shot, and hoping to hell it works this time. Back later this afternoon.
Have a nice day, y’all.
I take that back; don’t have a nice day:
http://nypost.com/2016/11/22/trump-wont-pursue-charges-against-clinton/
Either another fake nooz story or another “big surprise.”
They’re all in the same Cloud People crowd and YOU’RE NOT.
in order to play the float on the checks the University issued
Years ago that used to be the case when physical checks were sent from local banks to clearing houses, to the fed, then on to the originating bank. Now with electronic transactions and images of the checks clearing a check from a small bank on the east coast to a bank on the west coast is about a day. With the low interest rates, EFT of payroll and many vendor payments there is not much to be made on float.
When I worked for Burroughs all the payroll was by check (this was in 1980) and the checks were issued out of a small bank in Minnesota. Took about four days for the checks to clear the issuing bank. With a company the size of Burroughs, interest rates rates much higher, there was some money to be made on float. Today would be a tenth or less of what it was back then. There is still some money to be made but not much unless you are a really big operation. For smaller operations the hassle would be more than what you could make.
My former employer was (is) a payroll processor. Even a day of float on > $1million is not bad. The business model is NOT built on float, but float covered Christmas bonuses every year – even the bad years. Those were the accounts where the check was written on the processor’s account. There’s risk there, too. Miss a payment and….
Customer accounts were an entirely different matter. They were typically no-profit accounts. Seize the money from the customer account, deposit in the employee’s account, then charge the customer for the time. NOT as much money to be made that way.
Understood. But while you’re waiting for appointments you could be reading something business related or making a to do list or something. Just like I should be applying for jobs or working on small business stuff instead of posting here.
There are a lot of automatic assumptions that are no longer true. Like getting anything from the float… transaction fees would eat the low overnight interest anyway in most cases. Or stocks and bonds always moving in opposite directions…. or owning being better than renting… or 7% returns in the stock market.
Or even more prosaic, online dating has become absolutely normal. Buying online used to be unusual. Assuming Ebay prices or online prices are lower (not anymore necessarily) than other outlets. Remember when “made in Japan” was an indication of cheap crap?
Paying for an OS. Boxed software. For that matter, paid for software. Remember the articles wondering if we’d EVER have a “sub-$1000” laptop?
Stuff changes around us without our noticing.
This “end of year” is a good time to take a fresh look around and see what’s changed.
Neighborhood changing? Area changing?
How’s your employer doing?
When’s the last time you looked hard at your home? Car?
How are your relationships?
What about long term financial arrangements? IRAs performing? Forgotten accounts? Money ‘parked’ somewhere just sitting? Inheritance rotting away because you don’t want to deal with it? Services billing that you don’t use?
Got a phone line for a fax you don’t use? Fax service? Fax machine??
Projects piled up? Abandoned hobbies?
Doing anything by rote that you don’t need to do any longer?
Did you STOP doing something you liked for reasons that are no longer valid?
Are you doing something you don’t like that you could change?
We all go thru life with assumptions and models in our heads of how the world around us IS and WORKS. We rarely update those models/shortcuts. Even self image is a shortcut, it’s why we think we look different in photos, we are SEEING instead of remembering. (The camera doesn’t add ten pounds, it shows what’s really there, without the mental edits.) [‘nother way of expressing normalcy bias]
Might be time for a reassessment, a cold hard look around, an awakening…
nick
Since I’ve been in the ‘irregular economy’ (to coin a phrase) for most of my career, and even MORE irregular for the last several years, maybe it’s time for an article on ways to make some extra (or regular) cash.
Unfortunately, I’m actually doing work today.
n
Even a day of float on > $1million is not bad
At 2% interest a day of float on $1 million is only $54.79. If you have cash flow of $1 million a day that float amount is petty cash and probably not worth the hassle. If you have cash flow of $100 million a day you can make $5479.45 each day, again probably not worth the hassle of dealing with distant banks, making certain there are enough funds, etc. In my opinion you would need four or five days of float to make it worthwhile and that just does not happen in today’s banking environment.
Nor will you get anything close to 2%.
Ray wrote:
“Float is probably a trivial amount. What is probably happening is the company is playing games with their cash flow. Makes their balance sheet look better.”
One of my pals was treasurer or such of a minor South Australian company that was a bit short of dough. When their preferred airline sent a monthly bill for, say, $45,721.00 he’d wait ’till the due date and send them a cheque for $4,572.10. When the airline queried he’d apologise profusely and say that a typist must have misplaced the decimal point…
Depending on how the training jobs are assigned and supervised, Mrs OFD may actually be a statutory employee. A former employer of mine got caught by this. They hired back a bunch of laid off employees as contractors. IRS said “Nope”. They got SE tax refunds and checks for the value of benefits they didn’t get.
Playing with floats was worth it for large government departments that hand out lots of moolah.
A boss once told me that at his former department (Social Security) the banks called a meeting and asked the department to pay them for putting government money in “clients” accounts. The department responded that they’d do that, if the banks would pay interest on the money the banks held onto for a day or two before depositing it in the “clients” accounts. The banks immediately said, ahh-um forget it. (This was 25 years ago when interest rates were much higher.)
What I’ve seen happen with some companies is getting money to cross monthly, quarterly or annual boundaries. Get those January orders booked in December, defer some December expenses to January, and – wow! What a whopping year!
If they get greedy and want another great year, so they try to push November into February. The problem is: it only works once, and then you have to repeat the contortions again every year just to stay even. It’s a stupid game to play, but that doesn’t stop even big companies from trying it.
banks called a meeting and asked the department to pay them
The holding company that I worked for in Texas would generally clear about a billion dollars a day on average. Some days less, some days a lot more such as military payday. Thus playing the float game in the 80’s was well worth the money. The bank hired a pilot and plane that was used strictly for getting items from San Antonio to Memphis so an earlier FedEx flight to New York would get the items to the Federal Reserve clearing house. Cost several thousands of dollars but was cost effective to the bank. Not so today with check truncation and network connected clearing houses along with really low interest rates.
Because it was San Antonio there was a large military presence and thus a large military payroll. We would get two tapes from somewhere with the ACH items. Took two tapes because there was a monetary limit on what a tape could contain for total amount of the transactions. Thus it took two tapes. We did not run that tape until the morning of payroll, Friday if the date was a weekend. We did not really post the items to the accounts as that was done during the nightly batch processing. Instead we just placed a negative hold on the account thus making the funds available to the customer. Thus no interest was paid on the money in the case of savings accounts until the item actually posted that night. Fulfilled the legal requirement of having the funds available. The bank got the interest for the day, the customer did not.
then you have to repeat the contortions again every year just to stay even
I do that with my property taxes. I paid 2015’s taxes early in 2016 before they were due. I will pay 2016’s taxes late December. Thus I have two property tax donations in the tax year. The next year I will have none. By doubling up I am able to exceed the standard deduction every other year. A small benefit.
Did the same on the mortgage when I had one. The year I was doubling up on the taxes I would pay January in December of the tax year thus having 13 payments for that year, only 11 for the next.
Update on wife’s pay checks: one check, the smaller one, of course, arrived in snail mail at the post office box in the late afternoon yesterday, all by itself, hours after all the other mail had been posted in there. Not the first time this has happened, dunno why it would be so. Meanwhile her “employers” had a couple of different stories since last week on what they were doing with them and claimed the larger check was being FedEx’ed Overnight here as of yesterday. It did not arrive today and the clueless dolt office worker did not send her a tracking number as was promised, either. No idea where that one is now. Wife is PISSED OFF.
(especially after just having to pony up almost ALL of that check for the next two weeks of assignment accommodations and car rentals in Queens and Hackensack.) Which she won’t see refunded until late December or even next year.