Small Businesses Couldn't Pay Rent in October

The Ohio River stands in front of businesses in Pomeroy, Ohio.  Photographer: Ty Wright/Bloomberg





Rent delinquency rates among US small businesses increased significantly this month, a new report shows.

About 37% of small businesses, which between them employ almost half of all Americans working in the private sector, were unable to pay their rent in full in October. 

That’s according to a survey from Boston-based Alignable, a network of 7 million small business members. It’s up seven percentage points from last month and is now at the highest pace this year, the survey showed.

Chuck Casto, head of research, at Alignable, said that small business owners are resilient but incomes are “basically being eaten away by inflationary pressures.”  READ MORE...

UFO

 

Coffin in Spain Changes History

Researchers excavating Roman ruins at Los Villaricos in southern Spain have discovered a well-preserved coffin adorned with geometric patterns and interlocking ivy leaves. 

As local news outlet Murcia Today reports, the sarcophagus likely dates to the sixth century C.E., when the Visigoths, among other Germanic tribes, invaded territories formerly held by the fallen Roman Empire.

Archaeologists from the University of Murcia found the 6.5-foot-long coffin during a summer dig at Los Villaricos, a large-scale agricultural settlement established by the Romans around the first century C.E. 

Per Heritage Daily, the sarcophagus was buried at a Roman villa repurposed by the Visigoths following its abandonment around the fifth century C.E. The Germanic conquerors used the structure’s central patio area as a necropolis.  READ MORE...

Mountains

 

Big Arms

 

Internet Scam

"But I have to," he groaned through the cracks of my iPhone 4. "It’s in the name of self-care." I was sitting on the edge of my bed, staring fixated at the black mould splattering the ceiling of my third-year university house share. I’d just returned from my then-boyfriend’s house, where we were celebrating his return to our university city after spending some time in his hometown. 

Everything was fine in the time we spent together, but during the half-an-hour bus ride to reach my home, he had suddenly experienced an epiphany where he determined that the right thing to do was to immediately call time on our relationship — but it’s okay, he isn’t the bad guy, because it was all done in the name of "self-care."

Sure, he could’ve communicated his concerns earlier, but under this definition of self-care, you don’t "owe" people anything. Suddenly, every relationship in your life becomes transactional, as you hyperfocus on how the people in your life are serving you, and cutting them off or shutting them down the minute they seem to desire anything in return.

When did self-care become…something else?

Once upon a time, self-care was about striving to be the best version of yourself, because ultimately, how can you look after others if you aren’t looking after yourself?  READ MORE...

Dice

Nation Mourns

Police said they've launched a 475-member task force to invetigate Saturday's disaster, which was concentrated in a sloped, narrow alley.

South Korean police investigated on Monday what caused a crowd surge that killed more than 150 people including 26 foreigners during Halloween festivities in Seoul in the country's worst disaster in years, as President Yoon Suk Yeol and tens of thousands of others paid respects to the dead at special mourning sites.

Saturday's disaster was concentrated in a sloped, narrow alley in Seoul's Itaewon neighborhood, a popular nightlife district, with witnesses and survivors recalling a "hell-like" chaos with people falling on each other like dominoes. They said the entire Itaewon area was jammed with slow-moving vehicles and partygoers clad in Halloween costumes, making it impossible for rescuers and ambulances to reach the crammed alleys in time.    READ MORE...

Gentle Water

 

Death Sentence

Family members of students killed in the mass shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Fla., including Linda Beigel Schulman, Michael Schulman, Patricia Padauy-Oliver, Fred Guttenberg and others, arrived to hear the sentencing verdict in the trial of Nikolas Cruz. POOL PHOTO BY AMY BETH BENNETT





After a Florida jury voted to sentence Nikolas Cruz to life in prison earlier this month for the murders of 17 people at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, news coverage focused on the disappointment and rage of his victims’ families. Many of them wanted the death penalty, and some will speak in court at his sentencing on Nov. 1.

Cruz’s trial featured days of defense testimony about his adversities, including his mother’s drug and alcohol use while he was developing in utero. That was his right — the Supreme Court long ago said, when the death penalty is on the table, juries must consider the whole person, not just the single crime — but it left the impression that Cruz had won a sympathy contest. 

“This jury failed our families today,” Fred Guttenberg, the father of Jaime Guttenberg, told reporters. Soon after, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis suggested that state law, which requires a unanimous jury vote for death, might be changed to “be better serving victims of crime, and the families of victims.”  READ MORE...

Windy

 

Cost of Goods Sold or Manufactured

What is involved in the cost of goods sold or manufactured?

• Direct Labor
• Indirect Labor
• Cost of Materials
• Cost of Storing Materials
• Overhead Costs like
• Electricity
• Gas
• Water
• Telephones
• Office Supplies
• Building Maintenance
• Maintenance Supplies
• Equipment Purchases
• Quality Control
• Training

Two areas of which you may not be aware are Quality Control and Training...

Training

1. Employees must be training on company policies and procedures including safety standards and sexual harassment.
2. Employees must also be trained in how to operate any machines they are using and how to maintain and repair those machines.
3. Employees must be trained in simple math in order to make the calculation that are part of machine operations.(Because these employees did not learn algebra I and II in high school, the industry must do what the school systems did not do)
4. Statistical Process Control classes need to be taught to employees so that quality products can be made with reliability.

Quality Control

According to government regulations, all companies are required to make sure that they produce a quality product that is ultimately sold to the general public.  Ralph Nader was originally responsible back in the 1960s for this happening.

Without quality control, the public has no guarantees that what they are buying is actually reliable and works the way it is supposed to work.

If a company is 99.9% accurate, it is still producing 1500 out of spec parts per million.

How many of those out of spec parts would you like to have in the automobile you are riding in or the washing machine you are using?

Those 1500 parts have to be found and pulled out of production so that they are not inadvertantly sold.

SO...  if the high schools do not do their jobs with teaching students, then that burden and cost falls on industries and companies...  which causes them to increase their prices...

AND...  if our federal government imposes rules and regulations on our industries and companies for whatever reason, then that costs money which is then passed on to the consumer.

DON'T FORGET...  when employees demand more money, those increased costs are passed along to the consumer as well...

If a company pays an employee $50,000 a year, it ultimately costs that company $150,000 in benefits which include insurance, retirement, holidays, vacation and sick leave.

AWARENESS IS KNOWLEDGE

KNOWLEDGE IS POWER

Shareholders Always Win

Employees want:

Increased wages

Increased benefits

Every 3 months, publically traded companies distribute dividends to shareholders for the privilege of using their money to operate the company.  Therefore, Presidents, General Managers, CEOs, COOs, and others retain their positions as long as those dividends are being paid and in the amount the shareholders have anticipated. Earnings per share calculations to determine dividends is based upon number of shares outstanding and Net Income.

Any variation of this must be explained and accepted in order for the Upper Management team to retain their employment status and/or be paid bonuses.

What does this mean for:

• Employees
• Vendors
• Customers
• Community

For the employees, this means any increase in hourly wages or annual salaries DECREASES NET INCOME as does increases in benefits paid to employees like:

1. health insurance
2. retirement or 401Ks
3. vacation leave
4. sick leave
5. paid holidays
6. disability

For the vendors, any increase they have on what they sell to companys impacts the cost of goods manufactured and causes the company to increase prices to compensate for the vendor's increase...  otherwise, not to do this WOULD DECREASE NET INCOME.

For the customer, if a company increases their prices, they must decided to pay the increase or substitute another product for the one that has an increase price.  If a product is substituted, then this WOULD DECREASES NET INCOME.

For the community, companys pay taxes which enables the local government to provide services to its residents like fire, police protection, as well as garbage pickup, and allows the local govt to keep their tax base low for their residents.

Additionally, for every dollar in payroll, $8-$10 in economic impact is created which allows the community to grow ecnomically and attract other businesses. 

Halloween

Halloween’s origins date back to the ancient Celtic festival of Samhain (pronounced sow-in). The Celts, who lived 2,000 years ago, mostly in the area that is now Ireland, the United Kingdom and northern France, celebrated their new year on November 1.

This day marked the end of summer and the harvest and the beginning of the dark, cold winter, a time of year that was often associated with human death. Celts believed that on the night before the new year, the boundary between the worlds of the living and the dead became blurred. On the night of October 31 they celebrated Samhain, when it was believed that the ghosts of the dead returned to earth. SOURCE: History.com

Over the years it transformed itself into wearing costumes, carving pumpkins, festivals, and trick or treat activities.  It is mainly a children's day or evening depending upon which day of the week it falls.

What is interesting to me is that when I was growing up in Alexandria, VA, my parents encouraged us to wear costumes and trick or treat around the neighborhood by outselves as it was a relative safe decade.  However, when I moved to TN in 1990, trick or treating was frowned upon by the Southern Baptists and also discouraged because some candy may have been poisoned.

Halloween is still celebrated and many people still wear costumes to work (only at those companies that allow that sort of nonsense) and some parents drive their children around in cars to collect candy from those people they know.  We are keeping our lights turned off and will buy no candy mainly because of the COST this year.

I would suspect that gradually over the years, the Halloween traditions will soon disappear once our grandchildren begin to have children.

Thanksgiving and Christmas follow Halloween and I wonder what will happen to those traditions in time....  the world has other things to think about than just celebrations.

Their House

 

California Sets Record

First, the good news: The amount of planet-warming gases Californians released into the atmosphere in 2020 was 9% less than the previous year — a record decline mostly because of motorists driving less amid the COVID-19 lockdown.

Now, the bad news: The quantity of carbon dioxide spewed by record-setting wildfires that same year effectively erased almost two decades of emission reductions on the part of the world’s fifth — and soon to be fourth — largest economy.

Those two findings — both released in a little more than a week’s time this month — have painted a grim and confusing portrait of California’s efforts to curb global warming. They also come as a U.N. report finds that global greenhouse gas reduction efforts are “highly inadequate.”  READ MORE...

Bird Swing

What's Up with Israel?

Israel: Yet Another Election
By Gwynne Dyer


Israeli voters are indefatigable. The election on November 1st will be the fifth in just three-and-a-half years, and yet the turnout is still likely to be around 70%. That’s especially remarkable because all five elections have really been about the same question: should Binyamin ‘Bibi’ Netanyahu go to jail, or should he be prime minister?


He is on trial for bribery, fraud and breach of trust, the evidence against him is strong, and his peril is real. The court system is one of the few aspects of Israeli public life that have not been politicised: former prime minister Ehud Olmert was sentenced to six years in jail (reduced to 18 months on appeal) on exactly the same charges Netanyahu now faces.


Netanyahu has benefitted from being a right-wing populist and ultra-nationalist at a time when that flavour is enjoying considerable success in politics (Trump, Bolsonaro, Orbán, Meloni, Modi, etc.). But it’s still remarkable that one man can make his fate the core political issue for a country of 10 million people.


Why would he even bother, given that serving prime ministers can be indicted, put on trial, even removed from power if found guilty by the courts? Because it’s a kind of insurance: a convicted prime minister still can’t be removed until every last possibility for an appeal has been exhausted, which could take many years.


Moreover, a prime minister, using his majority in parliament, can try to change or abolish the laws that he has been accused of breaking. Netanyahu has not yet managed to do that, because all Israeli governments are coalitions and he couldn’t persuade his political partners to go along with it. However, this time could be different.


Political attempts to bring down various coalitions led by his Likud Party began even before he was formally indicted in late 2019, and he barely squeaked a victory in each of the first three elections. After twelve consecutive years in power he lost the fourth election in 2021 by an equally narrow margin, and is currently in opposition.


But Bibi is trying hard to make it back into office next month – and this time he might be able to form a coalition that would end his legal worries. The Religious Zionist Party (RZP) is relatively new on the scene, but it is already the country’s third biggest party.


If a band of criminals managed to gain political power, you would expect them to decriminalise crime. If the RZP joins a victorious Likud-led coalition, its proposed ‘Law and Justice’ plan would take power from the courts and give it to the politicians instead – and most particularly, it would annul the current law against fraud and breach of trust.


The leading figures in the RZP, Bezalel Smotrich and Itamar Ben-Gvir, were once beyond the pale in Israeli politics.


Ben-Gvir famously admires Israeli terrorist Baruch Goldstein, who murdered 29 Palestinians and wounded 125 others in Hebron in 1994. Smotrich says “Israel should be run according to Torah law” – a theocracy like Iran, in other words. But Israeli politics has now moved far enough right to include even them: 62% of Israelis now identify as right-wing.


Bibi is not a religious fanatic himself, but Smotrich’s ‘legal reforms’ would quash Netanyahu’s indictment, so he would have no reservations about giving the RZP senior cabinet posts if the right-wing parties get enough seats in this election to form a government.


Will they? Impossible to say, really. The magic number is 61 (out of 120 seats in the Knesset), and the right-wing, pro-Netanyahu parties consistently come up with only 59 or 60 seats in the polls. The Jewish parties in the current coalition get 56, and the four parties representing Israel’s Arab citizens get four seats (or possibly none at all, if they cannot unite).


Like the previous four elections, this one is likely to end up as a cliff-hanger. It may not even be the last in the series, for most Israelis are just voting the same way every time. Meanwhile, however, the real world around them is going to hell.


The three million Palestinian Arabs in the occupied West Bank are near the breaking point. The Palestinian Authority, Israel’s instrument for controlling the occupied territories, has lost all authority. The PA’s unelected leader, 86-year-old Mahmoud Abbas, is in poor health and has no deputy or designated successor.


The cities of Jenin and Nablus in the northern West Bank are already effectively beyond Israeli or PA control. The young and heavily armed militants of the ‘Lion’s Den’ militia dominate the streets except when the Israeli army goes in shooting, and a third full-scale ‘intifada’ may be just weeks away.


Yet Israeli voters, permanently distracted by the Netanyahu melodrama, seem largely unaware of what is heading their way.

Running

Canada is Struggling

Diane Francis: Canada is a lightweight nation

https://financialpost.com/diane-francis/diane-francis-canada-is-a-lightweight-nation


OPEC kicked the United States, the West, and the world’s poorest nations in the teeth recently with oil production cuts that will raise prices to help finance Russia’s war against Ukraine and Europe. And what has Canada done to help allay this situation, given that it is a country with one of the biggest oil and gas reserves on the planet?


There’s no indication that Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau phoned President Joe Biden immediately offering to help the global economy and war effort by shipping two million more barrels of oil a day to the U.S. Has he offered to build a natural gas pipeline and LNG projects in Eastern Canada to help Germany and Europe permanently replace Russian gas?


Instead, Trudeau turned down Germany which was hoping to get a deal to import LNG from Atlantic Canada. But Australia did not and within days of rejection by Canada, German utility Uniper signed an enormous deal with an Australian company to bring in more natural gas. Even Norway, another virtue-signalling petro-giant, has boosted production to help Europe fight against Russia’s war against Ukraine and the continent.


Ducking an opportunity to help defeat Vladimir Putin is hardly surprising given that Trudeau’s regime has destroyed all but one of the 18 proposed LNG projects in Canada in the past decade with its destructive, anti-resource agenda.


It’s clear internationally that Canada suffers from a leadership vacuum and isolationism. Canada simply doesn’t pull its weight. It’s a laggard when it comes to meeting NATO commitments or supplying military aid to Ukraine or helping the world cope with Russian and OPEC price gouging. The latest reminder of the nation’s ebbing status occurred last week when France’s new ambassador no sooner arrived in Ottawa than he blasted the Liberal/NDP coalition for “navel-gazing” and allowing its military presence worldwide to wither because of sole reliance on the Pentagon.


In an attempt at damage control, Trudeau’s Finance Minister Chrystia Freeland said in a speech in Washington that Canada was open to approving “economically viable” LNG terminals — a questionable assertion given years of Liberal resource obstructionism. Such promises are futile, commented Adam Legge, President of the Business Council of Alberta: “How many boards of directors are going to approve their CEO to go and spend billions of dollars on a project and a process and an application that is highly uncertain at the end of that?”


Canada has also failed to protect its Arctic region — of concern to NATO, given Russia’s militarization of its Arctic region. Last fall, before Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the Pentagon quietly expanded its defense of Canada’s arctic region, with British submarine assistance.


Billed as a plan to beef up NORAD’s surveillance capabilities in the Far North, the move was undertaken because Canada has fallen far behind other Arctic nations. Britain’s top military commander granted an interview to the CBC, in which he essentially said that Canada needed military help. British General Sir Nick Carter said that Britain was “keen to co-operate” and then stated bluntly that the U.K. wants to “co-operate in terms of helping Canada do what Canada needs to do as an Arctic country.”


The Trudeau government has also failed to protect Canadians against foreign vested interests that spent millions on advertisements and activism to prevent and damage Canadian developments, pipelines, and oil projects, according to research from the Alberta government’s Public Inquiry into Anti-Alberta Energy Campaigns in 2021.


It showed that Ottawa also damaged Canada’s energy sector, between 2004 and 2019, by giving more than $414 million in Canadian taxpayer funds to 26 environmental organizations, many of which were directly involved in anti-energy campaigns. Only $41 million of the total was handed out before Trudeau’s election in 2015. Such self-sabotage is, frankly, unforgivable. Imagine if Trudeau forked out $414 million to groups against Quebec’s power exports, B.C.’s forestry industry, or Ontario’s auto and banking sectors?


The war in Ukraine highlights the fact that Canada has become a lightweight nation due to a government run by a woke coalition that doesn’t understand economic development, how to protect domestic industries, or the importance of tending and fostering geopolitical alliances. Canadians live in a great, big, rich country that is run by very small-minded, isolated people.