The Last Word on Gay Marriage

So the last leg standing for the ‘hetero-only marriage’ crowd, and at this point I’ll say it’s barely standing, like, starting to lean pretty noticeably, revolves around the word marriage. I think most rational thinkers in this country, and everyone who works in a modern generally non-discriminatory work environment, and everyone who has ever braved going to a gay bar even if it was just because they had the best drink prices, have generally agreed on a couple of things. They have agreed that gays are in fact people, that they have rights that allow them live lives of their choosing, and that they can contribute to society in a useful way. This does not mean everyone immediately wants to adopt the stereotypical gay lifestyle, and the gays I imagine would be offended if everyone did, but it is an acceptance of the fact that the sexual preferences of an individual does not necessarily make that person invalid. Many people have taken this thought and determined that for these reasons gays should be granted the same rights as everyone else including the right to marry the person they love even if they are of the same sex.

Junk Mail: A Problem We Can Fix

I’ve never been the type who was obsessed with tradition. Perhaps it was due to a bit of family dysfunction that tradition was never solidly engrained, or maybe it was just that life changed and the places where I lived changed so often that things were never too rooted. Rather than contemplate this much more, I will just call it a blessing as it has allowed me to be flexible, and to not look at things, no matter how long they’ve been around, as permanent. One thing we don't need around any longer is junk mail.

Junk mail is awful. It is so awful, that I think it should be illegal. Some just accept this as part of life. It’s been there, maybe not forever, but quite some time that it is now just a mainstay in life. I disagree though. I hate it. It is an out-dated form of marketing and it creates a burden for those who do not want it and for the environment in general.

The Last Word on Toilet Seats

I am writing this post to show that while I prefer to talk about intelligent things, some things that I figured would be common knowledge by now need explanation. I am also writing this post because I’m angry. That is actually why I write most of these posts. I am angry at stupid things that get posted on the internet that are then reposted all over my damn Facebook: http://funny2.com/mensrules.htm Men’s Rules for Women (I know this post was from a while ago, but someone posted it again and made me hate it all over again). I was upset on the first entry. Primarily because it must have been written by some unintelligent stubborn man who is making the rest of us look bad with archaic notions of gender roles. Second, the toilet seat should not be a problem anymore in this day and age. We are completely screwing up if we think that this is men vs. women battle. It’s not. It’s a situational battle and an attempt to overcome what amounts to a semi-awkward situation when we realize that there are more people in the world than toilets and therefore one of the most private and disgusting things that we all do has to occur at a shared location. Yes, men and women have different needs to these devices and we have collectively been intelligent enough to adopt designs that work for both genders. However, for some reason this is still an issue, one I would like bury now. 

First, here are a couple overall rules that, since we’re getting really meticulous here, probably need explaining:

Rule #1 - Guys when urinating while standing should always lift the seat up prior, it doesn’t matter which toilet you are faced with, this is universally true. If it has a seat, lift it.

Rule #2 – Cleanliness is always more important than general manners, and being clean should be the most essential manner.

Rule #3 - The long standing tradition where I come from is that you should always leave the seat down because women prefer it, I believe because it means that they don’t have to do any prep-work in order to use the facility. I imagine that polite also has something to do with it for instance, if you are in a private residence you should generally leave the environment as it was left to you, much like a nature preserve. That means if the seat was down and the cover was down, leaving it in a state where just the seat is down is generally inadequate. Every time one enters a restroom with the intent on using the facilities for their designed purpose, I presume they would generally prefer that things be in a polite respectful order, that would especially apply to the proprietor of the restroom but also any other regular users. This, however, is where we can run into our first predicament. What gets lost in this argument is that women prefer to have the seat down so it is ready for use, but more important than the position of the seat, is the cleanliness of the seat which is often taken for granted. Having urine or indirect toilet water (via splash back) anywhere on the seat, but particularly the top surface is a much more severe problem than a seat that is out of the users desired position. So keep these things in mind when evaluating your actions. So to sum up Rule #3: Always consider the interests of other users of the facility.

A Little Story on Karma

So there I was driving around with a weak key chain for my car key. It was an old loop that had probably been around about as long as the car had which is about 20 years. The only problem is that key chains back then weren’t built as well as the cars and extended periods in pockets and other cramped spaces had altered the integrity of the barely overlapped single looped ring. 

Over the past few weeks I had been unusually upset in parking lots quite frequently noticing that generally people don’t really know how to park a car and that they don’t care about the extent that their parking job might be affecting someone else. So on this particular evening while parking my car in a hotel parking while I was traveling for work, I happened upon another careless park job. Someone in a regular sized car had parked significantly over the edge of their space rendering the one to the right unusable by anything larger than a sideways smart car or a motorcycle, of which I was driving neither. Inconsiderate parking is such a pet peeve!

So I devised a plan. Actually it was really more of a reaction to the thought, “Screw this guy.” Since it was at a hotel in a white collar working city on a weekday, the odds were that this was a male between the age of 27 and 50 who was staying alone. And the man was wealthy enough to afford such a great car, or rent one, so he probably cared little about his effect on the more trivial people in life, e.g. those parking next to him. With these facts considered I used my skills as a former car dealership lot-boy to make this guy’s day a little more inconvenient.  Knowing he would have to enter from the left side of his car, I drastically over-parked in the empty space to the left running into his space and leaving about four inches between our doors. Since I was alone, I didn’t have to worry about using the passenger door of my car. If he was an inconsiderate fat man, this would frustrate him greatly, whereas I had enough space to dance the Virginia reel out the driver’s side of my car.  

Goodwill Is Great, But It’s Not An Asset

          There are a couple definitions of goodwill. The first is “friendly disposition; benevolence; kindness (dictionary.com).” The second relating to commerce, from Webster is “the capitalized value of the excess of estimated future profits of a business over the rate of return on capital considered normal in the related industry.” I’m very fond of the thing described by the first definition, and I’m not much of a fan at all of the thing described by the second definition. Unfortunately, as I am an accountant by trade, and since I usually spend my time talking about things I don’t like, in this forum anyway, today we are going to talk about the second one.

           For your benefit, here is just a little background on goodwill in the accounting sense of the word to help expand the meaning of the definition. Goodwill is only recorded when a company purchases another company for an amount that is greater than what the fair market value of the company is decided to be. It is called goodwill because it feels like an amount given freely as it is in excess of what the market would demand for such a purchase. Previously, these amounts were recorded as an asset and then depreciated (expense recorded over time a period of time) over an estimated useful life. Now the generally accepted convention in the US is to continue to record it as an asset, and evaluate it on a regular basis for impairment, writing down the value, but never writing up, based on updated value forecasts.

          When first learning about the concept of goodwill I didn’t really have an issue, because I was just learning convention and kept being fed answers to goodwill questions like “that’s just how it is.” But after four years auditing I have begun to take up issue with the concept. Because for all the reasons we had to debate what an asset was and what a liability was, and why we had to break apart anything called an investment and anything that was appraised on a fair value basis to ensure that nothing was being recorded to the balance sheet that exceeded fair value, for some reason I found that none of the rules applied to goodwill. That goodwill was an amount in excess of fair market value, but this time for some reason it was still treated as an asset, and for some reason that was ok.