I vividly remember my elementary school years. (Oh, wait. I’m old enough that this meant K-9, although some programs were K-8.) Our schools gave us homework every night, quizzes at least once a week, and tests every two weeks. Nowadays, that is considered bad form. For all the wrong reasons.
Monthly Archives: July 2014
Why you need an Enrolled Agent
The IRS is being squeezed. Part of this is a result of the insane concept that Republicans perpetrate about the deficit. (OK. I have a post coming up soon about this. Suffice it to say, all that hoopla how the deficit was the biggest bugaboo we needed to address a few years ago- well, the looming deficit problem is basically gone. Not because we cut the budget- that was only going to work over 10 years. But, because, as most sentient beings recognized at the time, the large deficit was simply a factor of the moribund economy. The economy picks up- the deficit problem is erased. Voila- we’re magicians.)
It was more often HiJack than MagicJack
For almost ten years, I’ve been traveling around with a USB device that, when it works, is pretty fantastic. Of course, two of my (four) devices have not worked in 2 years- and the company basically has provided me the middle finger of tech support. In a nutshell, that explains the operations of Magic Jack.
Ga Ga Goo
I admit it. It’s been years since I had a little baby around routinely. That doesn’t mean I don’t recall how it was when those first few words and sounds emanated from my precious child’s mouth. (It was the same feelings with my grandson, of course.) And, there are tons of babies who come into “my” coffee shop, where I am the surrogate grandpa.
To whom are they accountable?
Click-and-mortar?
This is yet another in the series about the two growing firms where I am serving as financial manager. I already wrote about the concerns of monitoring the daily operations (KPI) and the costs of expansion.
Something new under the sun?
I was reading about a “new” program being started at Lehigh University and Delaware. This program lets students pursue their own projects with no set curriculum for some of their education. Lehigh is calling their program “Mountaintop”, where the students request equipment and advice- but get to choose the concept they wish to devote a term or two to achieve. The underlying premise is that research, work experience, and independent long-term projects tend to foster innovation, collaboration, persistence- and amplify the knowledge the students have acquired in previous classes.
Who do you believe?
Practice makes perfect. Yup, every one of us has heard that- probably a zillion times, too.
And, for decades that was the established fact. Way back in 1993, Drs. Ericsson, Krampe, and Tesch-Romer published their results: The Role of Deliberate Practice in the Acquisition of Expert Performance. In that article, they declared that they could explain the difference between an elite performance and an amateur one by the amount of practice time involved. Not fully 100%, but 80%- which made this a pretty definitive study.
The Poorhouse Lives
When i grew up in New York more than half a century ago, I remember learning about the poor. OK, I learned about poorhouses and how they were made illegal. Way back in 1883.
Crocodile Tears
Wow. One would think from reading the headlines that the US Banks are in deep trouble. Below you will find two headlines from the Wall Street Journal. They make the bank conditions seem ominous.