Friday, April 30, 2010

This is the same birdbox I posted a photo of earlier this week...!

15 comments:

  1. Wake up sleepy-heads, Howard Dean is first.

    Also--

    Dissolve the Corporations
    Death Penalty for Bad Capitalists

    I've decided this morning that insecure people hedge their bets by sending someone else to take a flying leap.

    Alternatively, picture Goldman's Blankfein trailing his security blankie embroidered with the names of his hedge funds behind him.

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  2. hannah, I am surely in agreement with you on Dissolve the Corporations! Saw a T-shirt on Northern Sun. Can't remember the exact wording, but the gist of it was - make the politicians dress like the race car drivers so we know which corporations are sponsoring them.

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  3. listener, the snow is highly inconvenient, but still very beautiful. Not that I wish for snow in those amounts in Ohio in April. But it *would* have saved me from two and a half hours of mowing this past Wednesday.

    Feeling majorly guilty for doing some serious sleeping-in this morning. Must go do some equally serious work to assuage my guilt.

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  4. Bill Thomasson4/30/2010 12:11:00 PM

    Was up to almost 2 a.m. last night talking to my boss/client about what we expected the data to look like if it came in and how we were going to present it. Was up at 8 this morning. An hour later I got a call. The data had come in. A few final changes and we're done. Almost six hours before deadline!

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  5. Bill Thomasson4/30/2010 12:17:00 PM

    I'm probably taking "Dissolve the Corporations" too literally. The first thing that occurs to me is the number of one-person businesses that are incorporated. But if the idea is that the anti-trust laws need to be vigorously enforced, I agree. And maybe we need something to ensure that no company, whether bank or auto maker, is "too big to fail."

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  6. Bill, as it stands now, corporations can declare bankruptcy and just reform themselves, even under new names, like Xe, and there is no enforcement of their obligations to society. Sending a few corporate officers to jail does no good and the corporation can't be restrained in a prison. So, in the event of malfeasance, they should lose their charters. Dissolve sounds more drastic. Treating a private corporation like an individual person makes no sense.

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  7. Bill Thomasson4/30/2010 06:45:00 PM

    Hannah ~ I'm trying to understand. It appears that you are not talking about abolishing all corporations, but only those guilty in certain (unspecified) ways. But I'm not clear exactly what you're proposing or how it would differ from the sort of whopping big fine that would force Chapter 13 bankruptcy. (I'm not enough of a legal expert to know whether a corporation facing a big fine could get out from under it under Chapter 11, but I'm guessing not.)

    It's also not clear how any of this would really affect me, if I had chosen to incorporate as many writers do.

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  8. Bill, when I say "corporations" I'm talking about corps. that have the power to sway votes by millions of donations and armies of lobbyists. I'm talking about large corps. who have all that money to spend in the first place because they've got a little office in the Cayman Islands or something similar to avoid paying any taxes in the U.S. I'm talking about the corps. that sell off businesses wholesale, create thousands of unemployed and make laid off workers dismantle the very factory equipment they used to work on so it can be sent overseas for others to work on for shamefully low wages.

    Small businesses and individual people who incorporated aren't doing any of that. Just the really big guys.

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  9. Agreed. I've thought for years that the antitrust boys have been asleep.

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  10. LOL That would be helpful. Like Jerry Brown always said, bought and paid for.

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  11. The ironic thing is that Son + DIL from Maine mowed our lawn on Sunday!

    Work is overrated. What matters at the end of the day is not how much work you did but how much you loved.


    Anyone heard from puddle??

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  12. A W E S O M E !!! :)

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  13. YIKES! Poor birdies! That pic is pretty dramatic.

    We got up to 78 degs today, and I think tomorrow is forecast to be even warmer. Summer weather indeed. I'll get to wear my new UConn Women's Basketball Championship 2010 T-shirt. Go Huskies!

    I've been cataloging books at Library Thing. Up to 710. That counts audio downloads as well as physical books, print and audio.

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  14. Bill Thomasson4/30/2010 11:58:00 PM

    Well, I don't know. I'm aware of writers who have chosen to move to Ireland because that way they pay no income taxes at all.

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