Category Archives: Problems

Goldman Sachs Settles Their Case For 550 Million

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What a strange world we live in, on yahoo’s site, they wrote that Goldman has settled the US lawsuit for a bit more than 1/2 a billion dollars.

IMHO, the US government is one of the better ones, and yet they extort companies for money.  Changing the business rules in the game mid-stream, ignoring the deals made with the better banks during the financial crisis…  Acting like they (the banks) are some simple portray of a nemisis (what a joke or the joker) to the world.

Painting pictures of them as the bad guys and the government as the good guys.  Casting blame like they (the government) are as clean as clean can be, ignoring their legislation that help make the problems, or perhaps even the primary root of the problems.

I think representatives in government are forgetting poor laws (and lawsuits) make a society poor (and not just in the financial sense).

I think if the government really thought Goldman Sachs did wrong (which I don’t think they did, click here to read my writeup on it), then why settle?  I think because they knew that their case was flawed, but either way they still get money from Goldman.  Plus, they had nothing to lose really…  it would just cost us the tax payers if they lost.

So are such lawsuits a form of additional taxation against profitable successful companies?  I ask this because the government didn’t go after the companies that would have had problems with such lawsuits, even though they caused most of the damage…  Goldman was a survivor and successful at that, so did they charge Goldman Sachs a success (or survivor) tax disguised in the form of a lawsuit?

Readers, what do you think?

-MR

The Invisible War Against the Oceans

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The more I see the spread of the oil spill, the more I think it looks like we set off a oil bomb that is equivalent to an explosion of a nuclear bomb’s mushroom cloud in the ocean!

Then I started thinking about other ways that we are causing damage to our oceans and the corresponding sea life.

This BP oil spill has the potential to kill thousands of sea creatures in addition to making the beaches unappealing to tourist.  It’s interesting that we really don’t seem to care about all the dolphins, fish, birds, etc that will be killed in this Oil spill disaster!

So what else are we doing to make our oceans a cesspool?  Well, we all know that the United States, Russian and other countries have dumped nuclear waste from their nuclear reactors into the ocean.  The United States has stopped that, but I bet some countries still does this (even if it is under the covers).  

Garbage also has been dumped into the ocean directly (New York use to do this), but I can guarantee that their are definitely some other countries that are going this still today.  Cruise ships still dump their garbage into the ocean when they are out at sea.

Next we have the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, a slow churning of plastic waste products swirling in the ocean between Hawaii and Japan.  It’s size is hard to estimate, some say it’s ranges between the size of Texas to the size of the entire U.S.!  The bad thing is that fish are eating the smaller pieces of plastic and then we eventually eat the fish, or other animals eat the fish.

I really have to wonder how much damage we (all countries, not just the U.S.) are doing to the ocean and in the end to ourselves?

-MR

Problems With Late Night Blogging

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Here I sit, the red glowing numbers in my clock on the night stand in the guest bedroom/office beams 12:11am.

You could be thinking “ahhh, he must not get up early for work“, but if you did, you would be incorrect.  I get up at 6:00am.

You could be thinking “he must be one of the lucky ones that doesn’t need much sleep, since he’ll only have 5 hours of sleep” (I only had 3 hours yesterday), but again you would be incorrect!  I feel it the next day as I fight to stay awake in cubiclelville.

You are probably now wondering, “Why does this fool blog so late at night?”.  Well, it’s partially it’s the only time when it’s completely quiet (kids, wife & dog are all asleep), but mainly because this is the time that I like to do work.  I was the same way in college too.

Do I think it’s healthy?  No, in fact in my case, it’s very unhealthy!  Often times, I walk around looking like a zombie.

Do I think I create better work at night?  No, I actually believe that I’m so tired that the thoughts are not as coherent as they could be if I were writing a bit earlier before I start to fight weariness. 

How long have I been blogging this way?  At least 4 months!

Sometimes, it helps to work through your flaws, like I just have as I’ve been typing.  I know it’s silly of me to try and type so late at night!  Next I need to create an action item to address/remedy this problem!

Originally, I was going to vow to start blogging at 10:00pm, but instead I think I will start to blog more during lunch time when I am at the library for lunch.  Of course, I will use the 10:00pm option for emergencies!

Thanks for reading as I work through this small issue! 🙂

If you blog, what is you best time for blogging?  If you don’t blog, do you find that the late hours of the night are your most creative?

-MR

Can High Personal Integrity Hurt You and Your Friends

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Today hopefully I’m going to challenge your perception of integrity.  Our entire life we’ve always heard that we should keep our integrity.

When I was much younger, in a much different life, I was a bagboy at a grocery store.  One day we had an onslaught of customers all at once (this was common), and one of the customer’s had a leaky milk jug.  So the cashier had me run the leaking jug back to the dairy section to put in the dairy freezer and grab a new milk (the customer was waiting, so speed was of essence).  Normally, I would drain the milk and then go back to the cashier line, I think I did, but I was not 100% sure (I couldn’t remember truthfully).  But this day, it was so crazy that I believe that perhaps I put the jug down and ran back up to help (but this turned out to be wrong).

Later, I was told to go get carts because we were out (and I performed it quickly).  When I came back inside the store, I saw the dairy manager chewing out a guy that always goofed up and was the likely candidate for leaving leaky milk jug in the dairy freezer.  Since I knew I wasn’t sure if I caused the problems or not, I jumped in to take the blame (again, I wasn’t 100% sure that I drained the milk or not).  This made the dairy manager (my friend) look bad in front of the cashiers and goofy bagboy.

Later I found out the Timmy (the goofy bagboy), also took a milk jug back to the dairy freezer, so it might have been his jug that wasn’t drained…  After my display of integrity and believed honesty, the dairy manager no longer considered me a friend, and Timmy continued to do things that got him in trouble.

So in the end, my integrity wasted and costly.

The moral of the story is, before you jump in and become the white knight

  • Give yourself the benefit of the doubt, in all likelihood, I did drain it but quickly.
  • Weight if the situation requires integrity.  Had I not said anything, nothing would have changed.  But by taking action, I lost a friend.
  • The person I help never said thanks for jumping in. So the effort was wasted on someone that wasn’t even appreciative.
  • Timmy wasn’t smart enough to realize that I was sticking up for him.

Have you ever been in a situation where a great display of integrity caused more pain than not doing so?

MR