Ethics at the local level

Here I have a whole universe to consider and yet the gnat in the ointment is nagging me.  Hope it ain’t a mosquito with West Nile virus.

This is the story so far:

  • My next-door neighbour, Ann, died recently.
  • Within a short period of time after Ann’s death, her husband contracted with a real estate agent, put their house up for sale at $10k less than its appraised value (historically, the appraised value, set by our local (county) government, is less than market value), an incredibly low $80k.  Keep in mind that the house on the other side of us sold for $437,500 on 13th August 13 2010, but its appraised value that year was $309,800.
  • The real estate agency was Keller Williams.
  • The house sold in three days, according to another neighbour down the street.
  • The buyer, I discover, is also a real estate agent for Keller Williams, named Alice Battle.
  • Today, my wife and I paid a courtesy visit to meet our new neighbour.
  • A building contractor greeted us, told us Alice doesn’t live there but, instead, is having the place remodeled because Alice, who lives in the city, plans to use the house as a weekend retreat for her and her friends.
  • The building contractor said he wished Alice had been there [to justify her reasons for buying the house] but, and he didn’t want to speak for her, told us anyway that Alice “just fell in love with the house right away” and had to have it.

Well, who wouldn’t at that price?  Is it even ethical to buy from a “friend” working for the same real estate agency who low-balled the price of the house?

I’m collecting more information.  Having been a newspaper reporter, the investigative side of me wants to get to the bottom of this.

Questions I have to answer are:

  • Are there ethical implications here?
  • Is this a common practice in real estate?
  • Is this a violation of any laws?
  • Is this a “tip of the iceberg” moment that might reveal more about why the real estate business was such a disastrous financial bomb dropped in the middle of the global economy?
  • Are we setting ourselves up nationally for another real estate catastrophe?

I guess I need to consult my friends in the legal department to see how I should pursue this matter.  We might have a situation that is worth calling in the big dogs of the newspaper business and coordinating our investigations across the country.

I can’t wait to hear what Alice has to say for herself because she represents not only herself here but also Keller Williams and the real estate business in general, as well as potentially putting Huntsville in national news and Huntsville needs more newspaper exposure like UAH needs another Amy Bishop on their professorial staff.

I feel like a hound dog that’s found a strong scent and wants to tree a varmint.

More as it develops…

A Virtual Nation Hidden Amongst You

For years now, with the near-ubiquity of the Internet, our virtual nation has collected the company charters and business contracts to make a legitimate alternative to land-based countries.

In addition, our advantages allow us to circumvent the usual necessities — a standing army, a bloated government, etc. — that hinder real progress.

The zombie computer in your technology-illiterate relative’s spare bedroom may well be one of our minions, processing bank transactions, serving B2B support roles and generally keeping our network of millionaires and billionaires off the books of cash-strapped governments looking to leech onto successes.

You are well aware that some of our businesses are [in]directly subsidised by the goverments to which you swear loyalty and, naturally, you expect us to share our wealth.

You are wrong.

Just because you have been suckered into giving away your hard-earned income/investments for the social good, don’t think we are like you.  We competed for those subsidies fair and square, just like all our other secret business deals you aren’t aware of.

Look at yourselves.  You talk about freedom yet you easily give up your freedoms for job security.

It’s the same thing here.

You talk about openness and honesty yet you readily buy your goods from our companies when you know we required nondisclosure agreements, secret R&D labs, and security guards to protect us from the openness and honesty you want that would put us out of business in a heartbeat.

Talk about a schizophrenic, shortsighted subculture!

Look at the companies you give your personal data for free: Google, Amazon, Facebook, and the like.

Every single one of those companies run their businesses out of view of the public eye, earning gazillions from the sale of your personal data, yet you know next to nothing about them.

We just took that concept to the next level.

We millionaires and billionaires have been cooking books since our ancestors discovered fire.

We’ll keep feeding you ledgers and financial spreadsheets from which we’ll pay our pittance of a tax burden to lead your eyes away from our virtual nation and its coffers.

The Chinese are some of our best customers.  In fact, they have insisted that we keep our current U.S. president on board because he and his staff are easiest to manipulate into toeing the line and pretending to serve the people although their secret stashes are larger than most.

That is why I take no salary for my work here because I know I am taken care of.

We do this for your own good.

How? You continue to show us you don’t know what’s good for you by buying the frivolous products we manufacture that are dangerous for your health.

Until the day comes when the majority of you realise your unhealthy lifestyles and do something to stop supporting us, who are employing you to desire, design, manufacture and buy the goods that are destroying you (a great feedback loop if we ever saw one), we’re going to keep profiting on your ignorance from now until time immemorial.

Our virtual nation will continue to fund the ultimate project — getting some of us and/or our biotech representatives off this planet  — because we know you, collectively, just aren’t smart and disciplined enough to stay focused on such a longterm goal.

This blog entry may seem like a reverse method for encouraging you to listen to our hypnotists but it has worked for thousands of years and will continue to do so.  Just in case, let’s reword it — repeat after me:

  • I am important.
  • There’s a unique place in society for my quirky personality.
  • My talents are not always obvious but my subculture depends on my contributions, anyway.
  • Some days it feels like unseen hands guide me — I will let my elders tell me what that means.
  • These instant food packets that contain nothing which resembles the animals or plants from whom they are supposed to have been derived are good for me.

Please ignore the last one — we have assigned that statement to our staff of advertising/marketing hypnotists to make it much more appealing to the false sense of personal tastes and preferences we ingrained in you during your formative years.

More news for the snooze

Earlier today, the government denied receiving accurate intelligence that terrorist groups had devised a reliable method of deploying IEDs in the shape of road reflectors, traffic calming “bumps” and other methods, including fake potholes and manholes, to disrupt the economy.

Spokesperson for the government, Jes Kiddin, adamantly denied the allegations that intelligence gathering is performed by 15-year old hackers, not seasoned employees of the military/spy agencies.

“We have never implemented a policy of using underaged children to determine how foreign governments use pop music to insert subliminal messages into their people; instead, we accept or wish we could collect taxes from corporations that regularly use and abuse children in order to profit from our middle-class people willing to pay full retail prices because we’ve convinced them to pay full retail taxes, too.”

In related news, the Revenue Extortion Service has banned all use of tax preparation software and/or person(s) acting as individual tax preparer(s) that permits any deductions from the full tax burden every citizen must share in order to prop up what pundits are calling the Greatest Ponzi Scheme of All Time.  Anyone caught claiming tax deductions, no matter their wealth status, will be denied citizenship and deported to Switzerland.  Rumours that millions of poor and middle-class people claiming tax deductions to join rich American expats in Switzerland have not been confirmed.  Similar rumours of French citizens with dual Belgian citizenship accepting banishment to Monaco have been confirmed.

Back to the news currently in progress that tries to stir people to care about the earnings redistribution business calling itself a government.

District 12

From my nephew, Jonathan, via email:

Check out this Kickstarter for a power monitoring device that straps on your existing power meter: http://t.co/Aykdtkab via @kickstarter

My wife and I bit the bullet, so to speak, buying smartphones tonight.  She got the Apple iPhone 4S and I got the Samsung Galaxy SIII.

Her iPhone sits in her purse while she plays games on her iPad 1 this evening and I sit here in the study typing on an old Compaq C501NR laptop computer while the Samsung phone is on the computer desk in the living room where my wife is also watching the TV show, “Leverage.”

Maybe tomorrow I’ll run some throughput speed tests of the AT&T 4G LTE network and later the WiFi hotspot capability using my iPad 2 and a Sylvania Android tablet as test subjects.

One never rests from one’s thought sets developed in previous occupational habits such as test engineer.

When I stopped looking at the rise and fall and rise and fall of daily readership levels, I found freedom in writing blog entries for the sake of a storyline rather than for the sake of making myself popular/likable by people I know only by their favouring my blog with a view and a like or two.

Ernest Hemingway died before I was born — his influence upon me is historical rather than living.  Same for Dorothy Parker.  Which leads to another disjointed thought…

Sadly, I must give this storyline a new direction, one which requires a day or two of concentration on esoteric subjects I know little about.

Talk to you soon…

A nod to Roy and Megan at Walmart; the team at Buenavista; Renee and others at Beauregard’s; Joe and Jenn at KCDC; Phillip, Jordan, Steven and Cedric at AT&T; the usual and new smiling faces at Publix; Theresa at Mapco; Allison at Raffaele’s (note: my mother taught one of the owner’s sons, a student of hers when she was a first grade teacher many years ago, to improve his English by encouraging the family to spend less time speaking Italian at home).

With so many teachers out of work across the country, is now a good time to perform a giant experiment in Chicago, getting rid of the old system and trying a new one?  After all, if the students’ performance is as bad as they say, would it hurt to throw out the broken system and start anew, bringing in a whole slew of nonunion teachers teaching/coaching an immersive education program that provides low pay but high bonuses for teachers whose students become more curious and make continuous improvement an ingrained way of thinking rather than a “must do” chore to survive one’s childhood years before getting out of the system and becoming whatever unmotivated/dropout students tend to become?

Oh well, that’s not where this storyline is going but I had to put it out there.

Latest score in preserving world peace

For those of you keeping count at home, here’s the latest score:

Non-U.S.

2,977 victims and 19 hijackers on 9/11/2001
3173 and counting deaths of U.S/ally military in Operation Enduring Freedom
4 U.S. embassy personnel in recent Libyan attack

U.S.

1 (Osama bin Laden)
2,562 – 3,325 (via drone attacks)
countless thousands of “insurgents”

Annual domestic U.S. deaths by category:

  • Heart disease: 599,413
  • Cancer: 567,628
  • Chronic lower respiratory diseases: 137,353
  • Stroke (cerebrovascular diseases): 128,842
  • Alzheimer’s disease: 79,003
  • Diabetes: 68,705
  • Influenza and Pneumonia: 53,692
  • Nephritis, nephrotic syndrome, and nephrosis: 48,935
  • Intentional self-harm (suicide): 36,909
  • Accidents (unintentional injuries) ………………………..118,021
        Transport accidents ………………………………..39,031
        Motor vehicle accidents……36,216
        Other land transport accidents….1,033
        Water, air and space, and other………………………………….1,782
        Nontransport accidents ………………………………78,990
        Falls …………………………………………24,792
        Accidental discharge of firearms…………………………..554
        Assault (homicide)…………………………… 16,799
        — Assault (homicide) by discharge of firearms …………………..11,493
      — Assault (homicide) by other unspecified means……..5,306

Winner?  You decide

A student of history stirring the melting pot

After observing the past, present and future, I have decided, in case it’s my last chance to vote for a white, heterosexual, male, Anglo-Saxon Protestant candidate for U.S. President, to cast my ballot in November for Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan.

I don’t agree with all of their politics but, as a student of history, I see that there’s still a place in international business for the voices of white males having Northern European ancestry who made positive contributions to the idea of a democratic republic with capitalistic tendencies (i.e., the United States) and demand more of the working class than a fallback position on publicly-funded social support programs in tough times.

It is also my way of honouring my parents, whom my mother reminded me this weekend have been Republican supporters since the days of Dwight Eisenhower.

The best way to reform a group is from within, less so from the position of the fringe groups or political parties I’ve supported in the past.

A corporation is not a citizen but a citizen doesn’t always know what’s right for competitive business practices, either.

There is a thin line between predation and competition to define more clearly.

As the world absorbs and reflects the principles espoused by dead white male European philosophers regarding capitalism and communism, I will support positions of whomever is popularly elected as long as those leaders understand the basic premise that a set of states of energy which has found a way to build stronger bonds with states of energy around it will also stumble upon a method to recreate a version of itself which competes against other sets for building stronger bonds, regardless of one’s preferred set of anthropomorphic origin stories.

My slogan: “Business. Science. Competition.”

I am competing against a version of me 1000 years from now that doesn’t care about characterisations or labels like white, heterosexual, male, Anglo-Saxon Protestant candidate for U.S. President.

By voting for Romney, I realise I support the concern that establishing a stable population dependent on government support is anathema to the future where I need cooperative competition in the marketplace for resources to get our species off its collective hindends and heading out into the cosmos.

I cringe to think about a version of myself sitting at home, unemployed, receiving government funds, unconcerned about efficient distribution/competition, and serving as an anchor holding down progress while buying the cheapest, if not the highest-qualty goods available, because of limited income, lack of employable skills/education and/or no motivation.

Our species on this planet has a window of opportunity for active exploration and settlement of other celestial spheres but do we really need a social safety net to maintain and expand that window opening?

What is a social safety net?  Governmental organisations like NASA?  Department of Defense? Social Security? Medicare? Medicaid? Department of Education? Department of Health and Human Services? Department of Transportation? A government with three separate branches of power — judicial, legislative and executive? How about a bare-minimum government that provides “no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances”?

By voting for Romney, I’ll give the Romney/Ryan Republican Party ticket one more chance to get the balance between the private and government sectors right, preventing U.S. business from creating its own downfall, and protecting it from international versions of financial nuclear bombs without drowning U.S.-based businesses in noncompetitive laws, rules and regulations.  If Obama is reelected, I expect the same from his administration working in cooperation with other government public business entities around the globe.

Then, I’ll return to voting for the Nader-type candidates for U.S. President, to keep both major U.S political parties semi/quasi honest (or at least hope to get them to incorporate nonpopulist planks), as impossible as it sounds, because I know that corporations and other nongovernmental organisations for whom we work, or which we hopefully create ourselves, are fueling the engine of our economy now as much as ever, so voting for a national political party to represent my corporal self, no matter the candidate’s racial heritage, is participating in nostalgic belief in the good ol’ days when “we’re the government and we’re here to help” had positive rather than negative connotations, whatever we choose to believe the good ol’ days to have been.

A strong national military defense is certainly a deterrent globally but I’ll take a little more, stronger, defense of my financial nest egg these days, now that I’m closer to retirement age than I am to my first year of earning a decent wage.

All while wishing that our species has better longterm goals than mine — putting Earth-based lifeforms on spacecraft while we still have a locally-stable sector of the galaxy to travel, populate and set up tourist traps.

At the end of the day, do I care about any of what I’m writing here in this blog entry if I am childless, spend most of my day with two aging cats, have no legacy to protect and only philosophical issues to turn into short stories via a habit of blogging daily to entertain myself while staving off the boredom of a 50-year old man who has seen enough of life to know there are fewer surprises to expect and less he wants to put up with?

What motivations do I have left if the only thing to excite me today is the thought of turning on or turning off readers by saying the flavour of ice cream I eat every four years makes more of a superficial difference than a deeply meaningful one to a person who’s tasted all the flavours and concluded they’re pretty much the same, separated by varying patterns on the ice cream cone to break the monotony?

Does it matter if in my thoughts I have a singular vision of what Earth-based lifeforms will look like in 1000 years that makes all of our concerns today seem miniscule by comparison?

Oh well, enough talking to myself here today.  Time to roll the rubbish bin back to the house, eat lunch and take a nap.

Quite frankly, on days like today, at 50+ years of age on a beautiful, sunny, warm Monday in a quiet suburban neighbourhood, it is difficult to motivate myself to care about anything more than finding a comfortable place in the house to plop down my body and escape into a dream world uninterrupted by feline companions, one day closer to the end of the set of states of energy known as me, the world of my youth practically gone (or on reruns in TVLand rebroadcast on media streaming devices) and thus me as an adult expansion of my youth-built core almost gone with it, leaving those who care about living to divide up Earth’s resources amongst themselves.

Today, I disappear into the dot at the end of a sentence and that is sufficient to say I was once here as thoughts recreated in electronic bits represented as words in a blog entry formed by pressing fingers on a wireless keyboard communicating with a desktop computer attached to an ADSL line talking to a DSLAM connected to the Internet (which itself is a network of routers, servers, and switches, wires/fibers passing/storing energy states we label 0 or 1, also known as bits – the circles, cycles and spirals never stop, do they?).

Zzzzzz…time to talk to myself in my sleep.

Two data points

Would you believe that Vladimir Putin is a big fan of the actor, Jeff Daniels?

Yes, it is true.  Putin admits privately that his latest stunt, flying with cranes, was inspired by a film starring Jeff Daniels, Fly Away Home.

Men quit jobs due to Internet addiction but deny they’re asexual, claim it’s just a cat infection problem — news at 12, 1, 4, 5, 5:30, 6, 6:30, 8, 9, 9:30, 10, 10:30, 11, 11:30, 12…as soon as Tom Brokaw wakes up from his sleeping pill addiction, that is.

Drum roll, please!

Wake us up after the ECB finishes its latest fruitless fishing expedition — you won’t find many appetising meals in the EU economy.

13,755 Days to Go

In the warm evenings of the year, I sleep on a sofa in the sunroom, often woken up by my wife on her way to work.

This morning, after my wife left, I heard the pitter-patter of tiny feet and opened my eyes to see a squirrel licking up the dew on top of one of the skylights.

On the driveway yesterday, a line of ants moved back and forth from one location to another, unencumbered by hungry predators, the ants walking around dry leaves and hickory nuts that fall from trees in this miniseason of early autumn.

The sounds of residential construction hit my ears — hammering, sawing, splintering wood — and I wonder about not just the waste and fraud in the medical business but the waste and redundancy in construction.

As long as it’s cheaper to dump leftover construction material in landfills, we have no incentives to drive innovation in construction methods unless there’s also a profit motive.

How can we increase the profit motive without imposing fees or adding regulatory disincentives?

For instance, what happens to old material — shingles, tiles, sheet metal, nails, underlayment — after a house is reroofed?

Where are the innovators in the reuse/recycle field?

We can easily see the potential energy of water behind a dam but we can’t see the potential energy of material in a house before remodeling?

I look through the lens of my eyes and all I see are sets of states of energy devoid of anthropomorphic qualifications.

What if we all saw life that way, how some states of energy bond more readily than others, rather than superficial qualities that are in meme states only?

Outside the window, the redbud leaf that is full of holes and starting to yellow has a sense of beauty about it but beauty is truly only in the eyes of the beholder.  The holes chewed in the leaf indicate a set of states of energy found the leaf material useful for strengthening its bonds, not for any sense of beauty I may assign either one.

Let us not confuse our brain’s excess capacity for making sense of the world around us for more than what it always is — adapting to our environment to improve our chances to reproduce our sets of states of energy.

Some useful websites for today:

The Uncool Factor

Do you watch minitrends come and go, wishing you’d joined in or at least made some snarky comment at the end of a news article about one?

Trendspotting is as much a trendy habit amongst the chattering classes as trainspotting used to be amongst the pocket watch clattering crowds.

Rich or poor, famous or obscure, we live and die, don’t we, as trends pass us by?

Billions of heads bobbing up and down in the soup of life we call our planetary atmosphere.

Will South Koreans stop chasing advanced college degrees in order to get good paying jobs because there aren’t enough jobs for people with tonnes of knowledge shoved into their neurons?

Will the U.S. continue to see a rise in minimum-wage jobs that count toward full employment, even if the workers themselves are underemployed?

How long can the billions, many climbing up to minimum wage jobs and many falling down into minimum wage jobs, survive on promises until the equilibrium is unethically inequal?  Promises compared to what?

These questions I ponder as I process the information I read from a product announcement made earlier today in New York City.

Plenty of people seemed desperate to tell me how great the newest Nokia smartphones will be in someone’s life, if not mine.

It was like listening to futurists tell me they were finally delivering the promises of yesterday’s future visions — flying cars, elevators to the Moon and immortality — that had already fallen out of fashion, no matter how fascinating, technically speaking.

All in a platform that seemed like something I’d seen before…iPod nano:

Versus the latest announcement, the Nokia Lumia 920:

What, no click wheel?  lol

Anyway, looks like the Ballmer/Elop/Harlow ship continues to spring leaks, but not the good kind.  Innovation is not the same as the “cool factor” that eludes many companies unaware of or unable to capture the zeitgeist for their personal use when trying to wow us with unavailable gizmos not a part of our general social sphere.

I think my mind is made up (and I don’t have a mind!) — without pricing or release date for the Nokia/Windows8 phones to go on, and the Nokia 800/900 being a Windows 7 deadend (or nearly so), I’m throwing my money at Samsung and one of its smartphones — probably the Galaxy SIII but possibly the Note II because having a phablet is the whole point of my venture into the smartphone world.

[And Hezbollah, you can kick my shiny, white Aston Martin.]

Middle class or not — you decide…

Reposted from here:

 

Why you’re not actually poor

 

By Kimberlee Stiens, LearnVest

In the “Money Mic” series, LearnVest hands over the podium to someone with a strong opinion on a financial topic. Today, LearnVest reader Kimberlee Stiens explains what she thinks it means to actually be poor – and why most of us aren’t.

I am sick of hearing about the trials and tribulations of the middle class.

Politicians constantly talk about strengthening the middle class (which is shrinking) or accuse their opponents of waging war on it, when I think the middle class, on the whole, has little cause to complain.

I’ve seen women on LearnVest and in my daily life complain about making $40,000 a year, saying that’s not enough to support themselves (to which I would add: “in the lifestyle to which they’ve become accustomed”).

The poverty line in America is $22,350 a year … for a family of four. In 2010, a full 15 percent of Americans lived below this threshold. Most American adults will live below that threshold for at least one year of their lives.

That’s why I think we need to change the way we talk about being poor or middle class.

I know because I grew up poor

I became middle class for the first time ever only about a year ago. I grew up fairly poor, my father being generally unable to keep a job and my mother not having legal standing to work in this country. (Complicated story, but she’s Canadian and only recently got U.S. residency. I think she always intended to go back there.) I graduated college with some $60,000 in student loans and a temporary internship position for a congressional campaign paying $250 a week. At least it came with free housing.

I graduated with a degree in political science and wasn’t sure what I wanted to do, but was mostly looking for office jobs. When I started college, I harbored the same illusions as the rest of my graduating class: We were freshmen in 2004, when almost all undergrads could count on getting a job after graduation, and we finished college in the middle of the Great Recession.

After the congressional campaign, I worked at a fast-food restaurant for two years while constantly applying for office jobs. I made no more than $10 an hour, with no benefits. So when I managed to get an internship in Washington, D.C., working for the Marijuana Policy Project, I jumped on it. I worked for $9 an hour until I was promoted to my first full-time, salaried position as a membership assistant, at $35,000 a year, with paid vacation and health benefits.

Finally, at age 25, I was middle class, but I didn’t know it yet.

It’s our choices that define us

I work at a nonprofit, a sector where salaries are notoriously low. Yet most of my peers here make at least $30,000 yearly. We all have health care and other benefits.

After I started my job, I realized that, for the first time,my life was no longer about what I could and couldn’t afford. It was about how I chose to spend my money. I could no longer blame the externalities of a cruel world for keeping me down.

Now I’m the office manager and executive assistant to our executive director at the same organization where I had my first internship. I make $39,000 a year (I negotiated my raise!), and live in Washington, D.C., one of the most expensive housing markets in the country. I’m paying off my student loans, and I’m doing fine.

Given that I encounter more than one panhandler on my walk to work each day, it seems delusional that anyone complains that $35,000 a year makes them poor. I live in D.C. and work on the Hill, where there’s a culture of made-up poverty. Many staffers work long hours and live in shared housing, but they all tend to make salaries of at least $25,000 with health benefits (and they have plenty of opportunity to move up after they put in their time). Everyone complains about being poor, but then they go out to drinks each week.

It’s not that they have it easy. They just don’t understand how much easier they have it than some.

Try another perspective

I’m not trying to diminish anyone’s experience. I know that dipping below a standard of living you’ve always enjoyed will feel pretty crappy. My point is that, comparatively speaking, it’s not actually all that crappy. Many middle class people, particularly those who have never really been poor, don’t seem to see that there’s a whole other side to the economy that they never experience, like a writer who struggles to pay for friends’ weddings. I’ve met people who have spent 20 years in food service, with no health care, no bonuses and usually kids to support.

There are middle class people who say they just can’t live in D.C. or New York City on $40,000 a year, but there are also people in those same places living on minimum wage. Take a look at the invisible people around you who make your life tick — your cleaners, the person making your drinks, your interns — and imagine how they make ends meet.

It’s a choice that you make to feel disadvantaged. If you make $33,000 a year, the truth is, you are actually in the top half of wage-earners.

Everyone can, and should, do a little more to manage their finances better. And while studies may show that we don’t feel truly comfortable or secure in our finances until we reach between $50,000 and $75,000 a year, it’s a bit dramatic for people to feel anything other than lucky when depositing their salaried paychecks.

Kimberlee Stiens lives in Washington, D.C., where she works as an office manager for a medium-sized nonprofit. She blogs at Business for Good, not Evil.