It seems that the teachers union in England, the Professional Association of Teachers, is asking its members to avoid describing their students as clever or giving their students awards for being clever as to avoid causing the students to be bullied…for being clever. This is the same group that last year asked its members to replace the term ‘failure’ with ‘deferred success.’ You can read about it here.
Thus my life accomplishments have now been re-categorized.
Warning: Semi-adult language to follow.
Yesterday I was looking at the stats for this blog to see if the article about Winston-Salem bloggers on the front page of the Winston-Salem Journal led to an increase in traffic over the normal three or four wackos who normally read this thing. Sure enough the traffic about doubled, but I found something even more interesting.
You see the stats show where every visitor came from and the majority of visitors come from search engines. If I click on the link it takes me to the search engine and shows me the search term that was used and the page on which my blog appeared. Here’s a small sample of some of the terms, the search engine they were used on and where some page on my blog ranked for those terms on the search engines:
Obviously I have a warped mind if I’m writing posts that pull in people interested in illegal chicken processors, nudists, wannabe anteaters, obscure indian cattle data and crazy televangelists. But when I got to that last one I was kind of bothered. I mean what had I written that woul equate Greensboro’s "blogfather" with a negative anatomical description/epithet? Ends up that it was this post and the anatomical reference wasn’t even about Ed.
Side note to Ed: You might want to find out who is so motivated to go four pages deep in a Google search for that phrase; me-thinks there’s someone out there with a thing for you.
Well, this got me to wondering what would happen if I searched "jon lowder" asshole in Google. So I did and I found that the search returned about 160 results. The top result was the same post that featured Ed and then number two was on Ed’s blog so I guess we’re even. Number five was a post on Vie de Malchance, number six was on Billy the Blogging Poet, number seven was another Ed Cone post and number eight was Patrick Eakes. These are all Greensboro blogs and people I’ve corresponded with so I started wondering if perhaps I’d done something untoward.
So I followed the links and found out that on Vie’s blog I was an innocent bystander and checking Billy’s blog I only find myself referenced in his blog roll so I guess I’m an innocent bystander there too. On to Ed’s other post and I find that it is recent and interesting in terms of the comments, but I had nothing to do with it other than the fact that my name is on Ed’s blog roll. On Patrick’s I find that I have nothing to do with it other than the fact that my name is on his blog roll too.
The dim light over my head is beginning to glow. It appears that if you use two terms, supposedly unrelated, they can pop up in search. So although I haven’t found an instance where someone has called me an asshole I’m certainly being lumped in with many assholes. Obviously I’ve probably done the same on my blog so I’m going to use this space to issue a blanket apology to all the victims of my random a-holes and other nefarious comments.
Before moving to Winston-Salem I played a lot of basement poker, usually at my friend Kevin’s house. I don’t get to play with them much any more, but they keep me in the loop via email. For the last two years a bunch of them have been going out to the World Series of Poker and it usually leads to some funny stories, and most of them have to do with "All-in Ben" (that’s him to the left), the craziest and loosest player in our group.
Kevin just got back from WSOP and here’s this year’s story in full from Kevin’s email:
You know how a lot of people have been bent out of shape because of the Patriot Act and their fear that Uncle Sam is becoming Big Brother? Well, maybe it’s because they fear that we’re going to become a society that allows something like what happened recently in the UK to happen here. Excerpt is from the Daily Mail article:
To the 12-year-old friends planning to build themselves a den, the cherry tree seemed an inviting source of material.
But the afternoon adventure turned into a frightening ordeal for
Sam Cannon, Amy Higgins and Katy Smith after they climbed into the 20ft
tree – then found themselves hauled into a police station and locked in
cells for up to two hours.Their shoes were removed and mugshots, DNA samples and mouth swabs were taken.
Officers told the children they had been seen damaging the tree which is in a wooded area of public land near their homes.
Questioned by police, the scared friends admitted they had
broken some loose branches because they had wanted to build a tree
house, but said they did not realise what they had done was wrong.Officers considered charging the children with criminal damage
but eventually decided a reprimand – the equivalent of a caution for
juveniles – was sufficient.Although the reprimand does not amount to court action and the children do not have a criminal record, their details will be kept on file for up to five years.
Appalachian State University is about an hour west of my house and is the home of the current NCAA Division 1-AA football championship squad. I also have a couple of cousins who graduated from that fine institution, but I’d venture a guess that they aren’t too proud of the official promotional video the school produced last year. The cheese factor is immense and while watching it you can’t help but wonder if Lawrence Welk has come back from the dead. Yikes.
David Cay Johnston is a New York Times reporter who wrote Perfectly Legal, a book I highly recommend if you want to: a. Get thoroughly pissed off and b. Get a better understanding of how our tax system does and/or does not work. Johnston has an article in today’s Times about how, according to a report from the US Senate Permanent Investigations subcommittee, tax cheating by the superrich is out of control. Here’s some excerpts from the article:
The report details how the Quellos Group, a tax shelter boutique
based in Seattle, “concocted a tax shelter” using $9.6 billion “worth
of fake securities transactions that were used to generate billions of
dollars of fake capital losses.”Senator Levin said that when
investigators asked for trading records they were first told the trades
were private, over-the-counter transactions. He said investigators
asked for trading tickets or other evidence of who owned the $9.6
billion worth of stock and were told the stocks were never owned by the
parties involved.“They just wrote down numbers on paper and
claimed losses,” he said. “It was just like fantasy baseball, except
the taxes not paid were for real.”
And more:
The investigation, which took 18 months, involved 74 subpoenas, 80
interviews and the collection of more than two million documents, and
yet Senator Levin said “the six cases we present are just examples,
just a pinhole look.”The 400-page report recommends eight
changes, some of them aimed at going after the law and accounting
firms, banks and investment advisers that the report says enable tax
schemes that rely on complexity, secrecy and compartmentalizing
information so that advisers can claim they had no idea that the
overall transaction was a fraud.“We need to significantly
strengthen the aiding and abetting statutes to get at the lawyers and
accountants and other advisers who enable this cheating,” Senator Levin
said, adding that “we need major changes in law to stop the use of tax
havens” by tax cheats.
And finally this:
The report details a scheme created for Mr. Saban to avoid more than
$300 million in taxes from sale of his half interest in the Family
Channel and related properties.Mr. Saban told Senate
investigators that he never understood the transactions but undertook
them after asking two questions of Mr. Wilk and his personal tax
lawyer, Matthew Krane.Mr. Saban said he asked whether the deals
were legal and whether a major law firm would certify them as proper.
The two lawyers, Mr. Saban said, answered “yes to both,” so he went
ahead.Later, when Mr. Saban learned that he had paid $54 million
in fees to Quellos; Cravath Swaine & Moore, a New York law firm;
and others for what turned out to be what the report described as fake
transactions, he said he felt “misled, lied to and cheated.”Lewis
R. Steinberg, who as a Cravath Swaine partner helped design the deal
and wrote an opinion letter attesting that it was more likely than not
to work as a tax shelter, told Senate investigators last week that he
relied on assurances from Quellos and Mr. Johnson that real
transactions took place, not fake trades. Mr. Steinberg, who is now at
UBS Securities, another firm named in the report, is a prominent tax
lawyer and in 2004 was chairman of the tax section of the American Bar Association.
After reading Perfectly Legal and Conspiracy of Fools I’m convinced that we’ll never see tax-reform or even an even playing field because the real white collar crooks and crook-enablers are in the legal and accounting professions and they have an inordinate influence on the Hill and throughout the halls of federal and state governments. Unfortunately I think Senator Levin and his allies are fighting a lost cause.
We went tubing on the New River last week when we visited my mom in Radford, VA. The river was low (got butt-stuck on numerous rocks; insert fat-ass joke here) and the "rapids" were whatever is below Class-1 but we had a great time. Now if we wanted some severe rapids we could have gone farther north on the New, or visited the Gauley river, or we could have gone down to Charlotte where the US National Whitewater Center has a $32 million totally man-made whitewater experience. Well if their artificial whitewater is as lame as their website I think we’ll pass.
Dell caught some severe hell over the past year or so and I have to agree with many of their detractors that they were slow to react. They seemed to be stuck in an old-world customer service/PR paradigm that was a little incongruous for a company that built its business on a "revolutionary" business model.
Well they might have been slow but Dell is beginning to hit its stride. They’ve launched a customer service blog called Dell one2one that is a great example of how a corporate blog can change the way business is done. When the blog launched it was criticized by some blog purists and PR/customer service gurus, but just like every other person/entity that ever launched a blog I think the Dell-ers just needed some time to develop their sea legs. After reading it for a few weeks I think they’ve developed a nice mix of PR (using the space to refute some negative statistics about them) and product updates (here’s what we’re doing about fill-in-the-blank issues). Basically they’re beginning to open up a window to their operations and if they’re careful and don’t become too defensive I think they’ll find that they will engender more customer goodwill in the process. Simply by admitting that they’ve made mistakes and do indeed need to improve their customer service (see here) is a huge step in the right direction.
On an anecdotal note I’ve noticed that more people are stepping up to defend them when stories about exploding laptops appear, or at least point out that it’s really more of a battery issue and less of a computer issue, so any company that is supplying customers with computers, PDAs, phones, etc. will have these instances occur. Until recently everyone seemed satisfied with only blaming Dell as if it’s the only manufacturer that has these problems. I think Dell’s willingness to be more open with its practices is allowing people to see the positive along with the negative, and by admitting that they make mistakes and explaining how they’re working on fixing them they are stopping the negative momentum. Remember it’s human nature to complain about bad service to multiple people but never mention satisfactory service at all so by using its blog effectively Dell is able to answer the negative feedback and then point out positive developments as well.
A lot of businesses can learn something by watching how Dell goes about this, because if they fail there will be a lot of "this is how you don’t do it" stories and if they succeed they’ll blaze a trail that others can follow. My money’s on the latter.
The Winston-Salem Journal ran a front page story on people blogging in Winston-Salem. I was interviewed as was a woman named Lucy Cash who writes a great blog called Life in Forsyth. It’s kind of cool to make the paper in any form, but the front page is really cool!
On a sad note, I emailed Lucy to introduce myself and she replied this morning saying that she’d reply in length later but that her father had died this morning. So what should be an exciting day for her has unfortunately turned very somber. Anyone who has read her blog knows that her dad has been sick, so I’m guessing she’ll get a lot of what she calls the "Carolina Neighbor Code" which will include home cooked meals and a bunch of hugs and offers of support. That’s one of the great things about living here.
There’s a lot of teeth-gnashing in these parts about the struggling Piedmont Triad International Airport (PTI), which is losing passengers and flights to Charlotte and Raleigh airports. Flying out of PTI has gotten bad enough that I’d rather drive the 5 hours to DC and I’m fine driving to Charlotte for flights to more distant destinations, whereas just a year ago I was ecstatic with the cost and convenience of flying out of PTI.
When I was a kid the Smith-Reynolds Airport here in Winston-Salem was still a functioning commercial airport, but now it’s used for general aviation and an air show. Still it’s runways are large enough to handle any but the largest jets and it is very close to downtown Winston-Salem which is why I think it would be the perfect candidate for an air taxi service. The FAA just gave the first provisional approval for a VLJ or "very light jet" and there are entrepreneurs getting ready to take receipt of the first VLJs and start their business-oriented air taxi services. Interestingly two of these companies are based in not-too-far-away Greenville, SC.
Because the VLJs are less than half the cost of the cheapest business jets currently available they are apparently going to allow entrepreneurs to provide air taxi services that are slightly costlier (one company is estimating $1,000 for a 500 mile round trip) than flying commercial but with greater convenience. Here’s a good article that provides an overview of the likely challenges that the air-taxis will face and how they can overcome them.
If these air taxi services do indeed come to fruition this could be a boon for Smith-Reynolds. The terminal facilities already exist but there are no commercial airlines to compete with so it wouldn’t take a whole lot to turn the airport into the premier business travel gateway for the Triad. Add that to the growing bio-tech sector here and I think you have two rather nice spices to add to Winston-Salem’s business development stew.
